Stephen Sinon is the William B. O’Connor Curator of Special Collections, Research and Archives in the LuEsther T. Mertz Library of the New York Botanical Garden.

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There exists in the NYBG Archives a file cabinet containing many small collections from a great variety of known and unknown individuals on various topics. Arranged alphabetically, several noteworthy items were recently rediscovered in a single afternoon while reviewing the ‘R’ section.

Winifred Robinson (1867 to 1962) of Vassar College was a fern specialist studying the Garden’s collections. In 1908 she wrote a 15 page letter to Julia Titus Emerson (1877 to 1962), grandniece of Ralph Waldo Emerson working in the Herbarium, whom she had met during her research at the Garden. The unusual letter reads as a souvenir remembrance of a walk through the Garden grounds and is illustrated with small photographic prints taken by Winifred. Many of the women working in the Herbarium at the time are shown.

The famous author, critic, and historian John Ruskin (1819 to 1900) wrote a thank-you note to a Miss Margaret Roberts dated 1875, which was donated to the Garden in 1959. Margaret may be Margaret McLaghlan, Scottish actress and wife of painter David Roberts (1796 to 1864).

A friendly note was written by a certain Peter Roget (1779 to 1869) to the famous Swiss botanist De Candolle (1778 to 1841) in 1833. This was found in one of the Mertz Library’s periodical volumes in 1982. Roget is the author of the renowned Roget’s Thesaurus.

Occasionally, the small collections file will yield up an unpublished manuscript such as that of Herman Rupp (1872 to 1956), Australia’s “Orchid Man.” His 41-page manuscript, entitled Gardens of Nature, was donated to the Garden by his son Arthur in 1950.

Charles Budd Robinson (1871 to 1913) was an NYBG staff botanist from 1903 to 1908, whereupon he left to become an economic botanist with the Manila Bureau of Science. The Garden was given a typed copy of Robinson’s 116-page Progress Report by Elmer Drew Merrill, who would later become Director of NYBG. The original copy of the report was probably lost when the Manila Herbarium was destroyed during WW2. It documents Robinson’s work in the Amboina region up until the time he left on an expedition from which he would not return. He was mistaken for a threat and killed.

Finally that afternoon, a letter elegantly written by the polymath botanist Constantine Rafinesque was found—written in 1839 in Philadelphia, concerning payment for copies of his publications. The letter was a gift to the Garden in 1935 from a Miss Burgess, daughter of Edward Sanford Burgess (1855 to 1928), a botanist specializing in asters who contributed descriptions to Britton & Brown as well as J. K. Small’s Flora of the Southeastern United States.

Also included in the file folder was a copy of an article Rafinesque published in 1817 in the American Monthly Magazine and Critical Review describing a fascinating encounter at sea with a “giant kraken,” which underscored the fact that while there are many species which are extinct, there are those that still remain to be discovered…