Manual de Plantas de Costa Rica 23 
(see Jiménez, 1967); American Alexander 
Skutch (1904-2004), based first near Vara 
Blanca de Sarapiqui and, over many years, 
near San Isidro de El General; and American 
Austin Smith, based in Zarcero de Alfaro 
Ruiz. In 1943, a visiting American team, 
led by C. A. Merker and including fellow 
forester William R. Barbour and botanists 
Elbert L. Little Jr. (b. 1907) and William A. 
Dayton (1885-1958), surveyed Costa Rican 
forest resources in connection with the U. S. 
war effort, producing (among other things) 
an annotated list of important forest trees 
and a crude vegetation map of the country 
(Merker et al., 1943). These were perhaps 
the first botanists to utilize the Pan-Ameri- 
can Highway, then newly opened, as an ac- Austin Smith 
cess route to the Talamancan oak forests Courtesy Luis Diego Gomez 
(Barbour, 1943). Their botanical collections 
were identified by Paul Standley, who would declare shortly thereafter that, as of 1945, 
“no other tropical American country had received so much attention from resident 
botanists” as Costa Rica (quoted in McCook, 1999: 120). 
The ensuing quarter century, from the mid-1940s until well into the 1960s, was rel- 
atively unproductive for Costa Rican botany. “During this period the collections [at the 
Museo Nacional] were badly curated, the libraries pillaged, and the efforts of sixty-five 
years of struggling dedication wasted” (Gémez P. & Savage, 1983: 5). A significant 
factor in all of this is that the Museo had begun to esteem archeology over natural his- 
tory (Kandler, 1987). Nonetheless, some botanical progress was made, and several note- 
worthy figures emerged. In 1949, Richard W. Holm (1925-1987) and Hugh H. Iltis 
(b. 1925), while graduate students, botanized in various neglected corners of Costa 
Rica, including the Llanura de Los Guatusos (in the region never explored by Pittier’s 
group). Their painstaking collections included many large palms, some still not other- 
wise recorded from these regions. In 1950, the Museo Nacional moved to its present 
quarters (Kandler, 1987), an old military garrison (the Cuartel de Bellavista) and, be- 
fore that, the house of Mauro Fernandez. During the 1950s, Jorge Le6én (b. 1916) and 
Rafael Lucas Rodriguez (1915-1981) became the first Costa Ricans to obtain Ph.D. 
degrees in systematic botany. Leén served for a time as director of the Costa Rican 
Herbario Nacional (CR), and enjoyed an illustrious career with several international in- 
stitutions; his botanical contributions include a regional revision of the large and diffi- 
cult genus Inga (Fabaceae/Mimosoideae; Leén, 1966), a widely used text on cultivated 
plants (Le6n, 1987), and (as coauthor) a compendium of common names of Costa Rican 
