Dear all,
I fully support Geoffs concluding remarks on Hartman's bibliography in the light of available means in her time. Apart from the fact that in the early days a "report for the year 1864" was bound to appear at least one, often two or even three years later (causing quite a bit of confusion in the publishing dates), in my rough estimate from about 10000 (?) annelid refs I have seen I would guess that about 10 % of her data contain mistakes (especially spelling of the non-english references), but less than 1% of the kind which makes finding the record difficult to impossible. I had some difficulties with the paralell German series (Sitzungsbericht(e), Abhandlungen, etc. of the Königliche / Kaiserliche Gesellschaft ..... (math. phys./zool.bot. Kl.)) and similar mischief, but on average Hartman's reference leads to the source without mishap.
wormly,
Harry A. ten Hove
________________________________________
Van: annelida-bounces from oat.bio.indiana.edu [annelida-bounces from oat.bio.indiana.edu] namens Geoff Read [Geoffrey.Read from niwa.co.nz]
Verzonden: vrijdag 15 februari 2013 2:53
To: annelida from net.bio.net
Onderwerp: [Annelida] The Polychaeta works of Wilhelm Peters
Hi all,
Most of the 19th century German zoologist Wilhelm Carl Hartwig Peters' work was on vertebrates, but in a small paper in an obscurely titled institute's yearbook he contributed descriptions of eleven new polychaetes and one new genus (Dendronereis). There is a problem however, in how this has been reported in the polychaete literature.
In a nutshell this item in Hartman's (1951) bibliography, subsequently cited by a number of authors (such as in Kirtley's 1994 Sabellariidae monograph) is bogus, and DOES NOT EXIST. All of title, journal, and pagination are incorrect.
WRONG:
Peters, W. C. H. (1854) Naturwissenschaftliche Reise nach Mossambique in 1842 bis 1848 ausgeführt. Akad. wiss. Berlin, Monatsber. Pp.610-614.
This one does exist.
CORRECT:
Peters, Wilhelm C. H. 1854. Über die Gattung Bdella, Savigny, (Limnatis, Moquin-Tandon) und die in Mossambique beobachteten Anneliden, wovon hier eine Mittheilung folgt [informal title in meeting report]. Bericht über die zur Bekanntmachung geeigneten Verhandlungen der Königlichen Preussischen Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Berlin 1854: 607-614.
http://www.biodiversitylibrary.org/page/11068511http://www.marinespecies.org/aphia.php?p=sourcedetails&id=51317
In the next year the same text was _republished_ in a more widely read journal as:
Peters, Wilhelm C. H. 1855. Ueber die Gattung Bdella Sav. und die in Mossambique beobachteten Anneliden [reprinted from 1854]. Arkiv für Naturgeschichte, Berlin 21(1): 35-42
http://www.biodiversitylibrary.org/page/6651050http://www.marinespecies.org/polychaeta/aphia.php?p=sourcedetails&id=51311
One could take the view the 1854 original doesn't really have a title at all (eg., Fauchald (1992), but it seems best to use the opening paragraph as that sentence was used (slightly shortened) the next year in the 1855 reprinted version.
PDFs of these two papers extracted from BHL are available at the WoRMS source links above.
Where does the false title " Naturwissenschaftliche Reise nach Mossambique ..." come from? Well, that was the general title of the excellent set of BOOKS Peters published on his African expedition. No marine fauna is present in those books. They are on mammals, birds, amphibians (Peters' specialty was herpetology), river fish, insects, and botany.
(example here: http://nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:hbz:061:2-18396 )
PS. I remain in awe of Hartman's data compiling efforts and what she achieved with organising information without the benefit of computer storage. Now days people like me can just sit at our desks and work these things out from looking at BHL digitisations which bring the originals to our screens. It was far far more laborious in her time, and sometimes her sources will have been supplying her with incorrect information on the more obscure works.
Geoff
--
Geoffrey.Read from niwa.co.nz
Lead Editor WoRMS Polychaeta (WPolyDb)
http://twitter.com/WPolyDb
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