6 CARNEGIE INSTITUTION 



It would be necessary to provide a building with equipment of 

 apparatus and a reference library, the whole to be in charge of a 

 resident investigator. It would be desirable also to furnish working 

 quarters for about five additional investigators, some of whom un- 

 doubtedly would be the botanists of experiment stations or other 

 botanists giving themselves special training for such positions. As 

 the work of the laboratory progres.sed it might be found wise to 

 make special grants of money to one or more of these additional in- 

 vestigators. The initial period of maintenance should be not less 

 than five j'^ears. 



II. Botanical Explorations and Researches in Central America 

 and the West Indies. 



A. A71 exploration of these regions with reference to the composition 

 of the different floras^ their relationship to each other and to the climate 

 and geological fonnations tvith which each is associated, and their inter- 

 relationship with the aboriginal or native peoples, bearing on the past 

 influence of the vegetation on the races of mankind and the probable 

 future development of the various areas. 



One result of the Spanish- American War has been to open to the 

 botanists of the United States a new field of research, that of tropical 

 botany. The floras of Central America and the West Indies offer 

 an accessible, rich, and comparatively un worked field. At the same 

 time the recent discovery of the manner in which the germs of yel- 

 low fever and malaria are transmitted has removed the chief obstacle 

 to the penetration of the white race into the tropics. A revolution 

 in the methods of tropical agriculture is a probable, almost inevit- 

 able, result of American influence. This has already occurred in 

 the case of cane sugar, the principal tropical crop with which Amer- 

 icans have had to do, and great changes have occurred in the culture 

 of coffee, rice, and bananas as a result of partial influence from the 

 same source. There is every reason to believe that the coming cen- 

 tury will see as great a transformation in tropical agriculture as that 

 which has been brought about in America in the past century in 

 temperate agriculture. 



The natural vegetation of any area is a resultant of its climatic, 

 topographic, and geological conditions, and the vegetation of adja- 

 cent districts varies as these conditions vary. We know in a gen- 

 eral wa}^ that the low malarial regions of the Central American coasts 

 are covered with a certain type of den.se forest. We know that the 

 interior plateaus and mountains have a wholly different type of for- 

 est, or no forest at all, and are often healthy places well suited for 



