Botanical Collecting
Joseph began to learn botany at his wife's prodding. She learned the study of flora after she gave up her dreams of being a musician. In 1915, while living in a mission camp and continuing to preach to the natives, Joseph and Mary made their first study together at Mount Kinabalu in North Borneo. In a period of six weeks they found and documented 101 new species of plants. In July 1931 he and his wife moved onward, leaving Luzon and the Philippines for Borneo again. There they began a plant collecting expedition which was later commissioned by the British Museum.
Still having a soft spot for Dickinson College, he and Mary created the Joseph and Mary Strong Clemens Scholarship Fund for students of Dickinson who are studying the ministry of the Methodist Episcopal Church. In that same year, 1934, he and Mary had an article about them published in the Manila Bulletin, celebrating the advances that they have made in the botanical sciences. Meanwhile, he maintained contacts with his limestone alma mater half a world away, writing a letter to the College in 1935 that became an article in the Dickinson Alumnus. It describes one of his trips to the Islands, and his impressions of the natives he found there.
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Famous quotes containing the words botanical and/or collecting:
“Evolution was all over my chldhood, walks abroad with an evolutionist and the world was full of evolution, biological and botanical evolution.”
—Gertrude Stein (1874–1946)
“Though collecting quotations could be considered as merely an ironic mimetism—victimless collecting, as it were ... in a world that is well on its way to becoming one vast quarry, the collector becomes someone engaged in a pious work of salvage. The course of modern history having already sapped the traditions and shattered the living wholes in which precious objects once found their place, the collector may now in good conscience go about excavating the choicer, more emblematic fragments.”
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