somed into an important but little known partnership with the 

 ultimate goal of publishing jointly a new folia orchidacea, 

 which eventually would cover all of the genera of the orchid 

 family. Several unpublished keys to species of various genera 

 attest to this undertaking in the archives of the Herbarium. Nat- 

 urally, Schlechter's untimely death terminated the project. One 

 important paper, prepared for this joint undertaking, das sys- 

 tem der orchideen was, however, published posthumously 

 under Schlechter's name only, as evidenced by the unabridged 

 copy of the original manuscript in the Ames Orchid Library. 



Professor Ames always devoted full attention to the smallest 

 details in every study he undertook. In the Schlechter-Ames 

 project, he would have handled alone all of the genera endemic 

 to the New World as well as those from the Philippines. To this 

 end, an artist was employed by him in Berlin to make life-size 

 drawings and tracings of all type specimens described by Schlech- 

 ter. Hundreds of these drawings are now the only available 

 information which we have of the Schlechterian species, since 

 Schlechter's herbarium of some 100,000 orchid specimens was 



destroyed during World War II. 



Busy and versatile as he was, Professor Ames never neglected 



to pay attention to enhancing the scientific value and expanding 

 the resources of his by then world-famous orchid collection. In 

 the summer of 1924, Ames agreed to pay some 400 German gold 

 marks to Kraenzlin as a subsidy to publish Kraenzlin's mono- 

 graph of masdevallia. On November 8, 1924, Kraenzlin 

 requested additional help in the same amount. In return for this 

 favor rendered, the Ames Orchid Herbarium now possesses a 

 rather large part of the Kraenzlin Herbarium, especially of the 



species described by him. 



The means and methods of acquisitions were indeed varied, 

 but so is the collection, which is exceedingly rich in type and 

 isotype specimens. The Herbarium's rate of growth not only 

 exceeded all expectations but also reached such proportions and 

 value that serious steps had to be taken for its preservation for 

 the benefit of the scientific world rather than the personal inter- 

 est of an orchidologist-philanthropist. Professor Ames, true to 



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