The Palmer papers consist of brief lists of his plants and more extensive field notes for his plants. There are two main sections of field notes in this collection--one set for Acapulco plants collected in 1894-1895 and one set for plants collected in the state of Durango, Mexico, in 1896. There are also a few notes by D.C. Eaton and Asa Gray on Palmer's collections. The lists deal with a few collections made from 1880-1897.

Edward Palmer was born in England on Jan. 12, 1831, and emigrated to the United States at the age of eighteen. He developed an interest in natural history collecting under the tutelage of Dr. Jared Kirtland and got his first major opportunity to collect when he was appointed to Captain Page's Water Witch expedition to Paraguay as hospital steward and botanical collector in 1853. After the Paraguay expedition he went to England to visit his mother, got married on March 29, 1856, and came back to the U.S. He studied medicine for a few months in Cleveland; then he lived in Kansas, Colorado, and for a few months, California, where he worked on the Geological Survey of California, collecting marine invertebrates. During the Civil War, he did medical work in army outposts in the southwest for a while after the war. He managed to make natural history collections while working for the army. The rest of his life was mostly taken up with making archaeological, zoological and botanical collections for a variety of patrons, primarily in the south western U.S. and Mexico. He is best known for his botanical collections, which are said to number over 100,00 specimens. He made numerous botanical collecting trips to Mexico from 1878 to 1910. Rogers McVaugh describes Palmer's botanical specimens as "exceptionally well documented for his time," a trait which was obscured by the fact that his field notes were not distributed with his plants.

Edward Palmer Papers. AB-AN. Gray Herbarium Archives, Harvard University, Cambridge, Mass.

There are also Palmer papers in several other parts of the archives: 1) 32 letters from Palmer in the semi-historic letters about 75 letters from Palmer in the Historic letters 2) plant lists in the bound miscellaneous plant list volumes (Plant List Box II) 3) field notes for 1904, 1905, 1906, 1907, 1908, and 1910 collections in the inactive plant lists file 4) xerox copy of a typed copy of Palmer's field notes for 1908 Chihuahua collections in the library stacks, FN P 184 f.

Open Collections Program at Harvard University. Expeditions and discoveries