A Journey with Friedrich Ritter.

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DaveW
Posts: 7376
Joined: Thu Dec 20, 2012 2:36 pm
Location: Nottingham, England/UK

A Journey with Friedrich Ritter.

Post by DaveW »

Phil brought this book to my attention on a UK site, therefore I have just purchased it but not got it yet. No doubt Daiv will have it in stock for the American market eventually?

http://keithsplantbooks.co.uk/details.a ... +Journey+w" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

For those too young to remember Ritter and his FR numbers, which you may still come across:-

"Friedrich Ritter (1898–1989) was an extraordinary German traveller, geologist, adventurer, amateur botanist, and cactus collector. He is best known for the cactus seeds he collected and that were sold by his sister Hildegard Winter, and for his 4-volume work Kakteen in Sudamerika, which summarizes the results of his many years of travel (1952–1971). Ritter’s personal herbarium was deposited in the Museo de Historia Natural in Santiago de Chile in 1972. The material – mostly mere plant fragments associated with small scraps of paper with short locality data – remained in its original state (enveloped in newspapers, packed in boxes) until the early 1990s, when the Swiss National Science Foundation financed a project to compile a complete inventory. This was done together with Beat Leuenberger, and was published in 1996."

Though he is best known for S. American cacti, Aztekium ritteri was named after him when he was working as a geologist in N. America, but you will find quite a few plants called ritteri named after him. As said above he produced a 4 volume work on S. American cacti in German, which you can read online Here:-

http://www.cactuspro.com/biblio/en:ritter" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
DaveW
Posts: 7376
Joined: Thu Dec 20, 2012 2:36 pm
Location: Nottingham, England/UK

Re: A Journey with Friedrich Ritter.

Post by DaveW »

Just received the book this morning so only had a quick skim through it. It has 94 pages packed with 339 of Buinings slides from his trip with Ritter. Being copies of old slides they are not up to modern digital images, but reasonably good and certainly of historical value as they illustrate better than the monochrome images in Ritter's works what he meant by his species. It's a pity though we have to wait so long for important slide material to be published, bearing in mind it does tend to deteriorate over time. Even Kodachrome fades with regular projection and many of the other old E4 and E6 slide films fare much worse over time regarding fading in storage.

"When stored in darkness, Kodachrome's long-term stability under suitable conditions is superior to other types of color film. Images on Kodachrome slides over fifty years old retain accurate color and density. It has been calculated that the yellow dye, the least stable, would suffer a 20% loss of dye in 185 years. This is because developed Kodachrome does not retain unused color couplers. However, Kodachrome's color stability under bright light, for example during projection, is inferior to substantive slide films. Kodachrome's fade time under projection is about one hour, compared to Fujichrome's two and a half hours."

Of course nobody keeps slides on the screen for one hour continuously, but cumulatively projection times can add up over the years.
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