Re: AIS: HIST: REF: Early Checklists

In a message dated 8/1/2007 1:25:40 PM Eastern Daylight Time,  
jijones@usjoneses.com writes:

The  way  
information is interpreted in the 1939 Check List is really  arcane.  



I do not find it so.  Some of the small strangenesses in it bother me,  
because I believe they are the result of someone fiddling around with the truth,  
but I find the document worthy none the less, and absolutely indispensible to  
one who will learn to use it, and remember to think for one's  self. 
 
The 1939 Check List is an intricate document. I find that using  it requires 
that one give the question at hand one's full  attention. It is a tool, like 
an atlas, or logrithmic tables. or any  other technical reference document of 
its sort, and one must learn to  use it well and skillfully. I find this 
requires patience, and a  good deal of practice. One must absolutely read the front 
matter of  the book carefully, and reread it often. One must also respect the 
tool's  limitations. 
 
One place people get in trouble, other than not getting familiar with the  
material in the front which introduces the book and tells you how to use  it, is 
in failing to remember that the book is really a taxonomic  document: It is a 
book of Iris names, not of irises as such. Like a phone book  is not really 
about people. More expressly, it is a record of the first  appearance, or 
publication, of unique Iris names in relation to unique Iris  cultivars. It is 
about words, then, and about words as records  of acts of naming. 
 
People also often run aground because they don't understand that  there may 
be, and often are, relationships between entries.  Entries impact each other, 
earlier determining later, and later impacting  earlier, so that the record 
changes over time. 
 
It must be larned, and remembered that Early and Late, and  Intermediate and 
Dwarf, to cite but two instances, do not mean the same thing in  the 1939 
Check List as they mean today.  
 
As for the color chart, it was never supposed to do anything other  than 
indicate broad color patterns and I find it does that very well. Here  again, one 
must learn to use it, and respect its limitations.
 
For those needing more intricate descriptions, AIS published elaborate  
descriptions written by Robert Sturtevant  in the Bulletin at several  intervals 
through the 1920s and 1930s. These were the basis of the descriptions  in 
Rainbow Fragments by Shull. Period catalog descriptions--and period  
photographs--are a real trap, of course, because the description is unlikely to  mention less 
agreeable features and it was hardly unusual for commercial sources  to use 
the same photograph in several catalogs to represent different  cultivars. 
Caveat emptor holds for the responsible scholar, too. 
 
I have heard people vent frustration about these issues for  years.  
Accordingly, as I said, I am working on a check list  of selected pre WWW2 bearded 
cultivars having all the information you need,  and none of the stuff you don't 
want, with full  descriptions,  where reliable information along that line is 
available. 
 
Cordially,
 
Anner Whitehead
Richmond VA USA 



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