MUSSELMAN TO DELIVER LECTURE SEPT. 5

Lytton J. Musselman, Mary Payne Hogan Professor of Botany and chairman of the Department of Biological Sciences, will give a free public lecture entitled "Postscript: George Edward Post and The Flora of the Middle East, The Value of Undervalued Collections" at 12:30 p.m. Thursday, Sept. 5, in the Mills Godwin Jr. Life Sciences Building auditorium.

Post, a Presbyterian medical missionary who was a professor of surgery at the Syrian Protestant College from 1868 until his death in 1909, wrote the first flora of the Middle East. His collections form the core of the Post Herbarium, containing important type specimens for many Middle Eastern plants.

Among other achievements, Post produced the first Arabic concordance of the Bible and designed several buildings on the American University of Beirut campus, from which Musselman has returned after a semester of study and teaching. Musselman himself is an expert on plants of the Middle East region, has published a book on plants of the Bible, and was a Fulbright Scholar at the University of Khartoum (Sudan), An Najah National University and the University of Jordan.