Author: Prescott, G. W. (Gerald Webber), 1899-1988.
Title: Iowa Algae.
Publication: Iowa City, Iowa : The State University of Iowa, 1931.
Series: University of Iowa Studies. Studies in Natural History. Vol. 13, no. 6.
This work was digitized using an OpticBook 3600 scanner, gray scale (continuous tone), 300 d.p.i. The images were processed using Adobe Photshop Elements 2.0 to remove noise. Unreadable letters in the text were repaired as necessary. When lines in the drawings did not survive digitization, they were restored manually. The original document was carefully compared with the restorations in all cases. The completed images were saved for display as GIF files with eight gray levels.
The index prepared for this electronic edition is not an attempt to bring Prescott's work up to date in terms of systematics, but merely an attempt to render the nomenclature consistent throughout and to provide hyperlinks for navigation. The table of contents likewise is a navigation tool and uses the names Prescott employed for the taxa above the generic level.
Prescott numbered species in the text and gave alphabetic identifiers to subspecific taxa (e.g. Rhizoclonium crassipelitum var. a robustum on p. 91). These letters were not intended to be of nomenclatural or systematic significance.
Size of drawings: Prescott gave magnifications for drawings and did not provide a printed scale. This situation could not be remedied without unacceptable intrusion into the images of the plates. As a partial solution, may I note that the original inked plate borders measure 10 cm. in width at the bottom. The last three plates lack these borders, but the online images are the same size as the others.
Those reading the plate caption for Plate XVII should be aware that the name Tetrastrum was accidentally omitted during printing before caption 11 (T. anomalum), giving the impression that it is Tetradesmus anomalum. This omission carries through T. staurogeniaeforme.
Those beginning the study of the algae who might stumble upon this book should be aware that many of the names of genera, species, and higher groups are no longer recognized as systematically correct for the biological entities described. The names used by Prescott can, however, be fairly easily traced to modern usage by their appearance as synonyms in later taxonomic works and in such online sources as Algaebase
Compiler of this digital edition: John Jeffrey Dodd
New material copyright 2006, The University of Iowa