Manual de Plantas de Costa Rica 17 
Alberto M. Brenes (1870-1948), with a doctorate in natural history from Geneva (cour- 
tesy of a scholarship from the Soto administration), launched his scientific career in his 
native country in 1902. His botanical field work was concentrated in the ecologically com- 
plex and floristically diverse region about his hometown of San Ramon. Brenes’s collec- 
tion, eventually comprising more than 20,000 numbers, remains the single most impor- 
tant individual contribution to Costa Rican floristics (see also Ortiz O., 2002, and Sanchez 
P., 2002). The similarly worldly pharmacist 
Ot6n Jiménez (1895-1988) began a long 
lifetime of occasional botanical collecting, 
correspondence, and publication in 1910, at 
the tender age of 15, and was director of the 
Herbario Nacional from 1911 to 1914 (Kan- 
dler, 1987). Pittier knew the young Oton and 
wrote that he was “the only botanical fol- 
lower of the botanists of the Costa Rican ex- 
ploration,” a “disciple of Tonduz and a stu- 
dent of pharmacy, who has already done a 
large amount of collecting and may yet sur- 
pass his master” (see Hasler & Baumann, 
2000: 145). In 1921 Guillermo Acosta con- 
tributed a small and unnumbered, but nov- 
elty-rich, set of orchid collections from the 
San Ramé6n area (see Schlechter, 1923: 270). 
Americans were conspicuously under- 
represented among the botanical pioneers in a. 
Costa Rica. After Sutton Hayes, the second oe Say Seen 
American to collect plants in Costa Rica Dosceaetice 
may have been Alexander Agassiz (1835- 
1910), who spent a single day (February 28) on Cocos Island when the U.S.S. Albatross 
stopped there in 1891 (Rose, 1892). The early botanical exploration of Cocos Island, an- 
nexed by Costa Rica in 1888, was characterized by such brief forays, mostly from pass- 
ing American ships en route to or from the Galapagos (see, e.g., Stewart, 1912; Svenson, 
1935; Fournier O., 1966). In April 1893, William C. Shannon (1851-1905), an Amer- 
ican surgeon, botanized sparingly in the Guanacaste region (see Smith, 1898c), mainly 
in the basin of the Rio Sapoa. John Donnell Smith, of Johns Hopkins University in Bal- 
timore, collected in Costa Rica for several months during 1896, working with Anastasio 
Alfaro and Henri Pittier (Eakin, 1999). Smith, though better known for his work on the 
Guatemalan flora, was the sole American contributor to Primitiae florae costaricensis, 
for which he authored two major fascicles (Smith, 1898a, 1898b). Later dubbed the “‘fa- 
ther of Central American botany” (Jiménez, 1978), Smith reigned as the foremost au- 
thority on the Central American flora for a few decades, early in the 20th century. 
