material. 
Five trips abroad for collecting additional material were carried out. Trips ranged from 
30-45 days and were accomplished as follows: two visits to southern Mexico, one during the 
Summer of 1992, and another one in the Spring of 1993; one visit to Venezuela in the Summer of 
1993; two visits to Brazil, one to the southeastern region in the Fall of 1993, one to the central 
and southern regions in the Winter of 1994-1995. In this way I observed several species alive, 
recorded critical data (missing data for some species, like vegetation type where they grow, size, 
and habit), and fixed samples for anatomical studies. A total of 14 species of Cinnamomum were 
collected in the field. In addition, 96 collection numbers corresponding to several genera in the 
Lauraceae were gathered. A set of the collections is to be filed at the Facultad de Ciencias 
herbarium (FCME), at the Universidad Nacional Autonoma de México, another one at the 
Missouri Botanical Garden herbarium (MO); duplicate surplus will be distributed to other 
herbaria. 
The first step to decide which taxa would be included in the study was to set a workable 
combination of characters against which nomenclatural types would be judged to separate the 
species belonging to Cinnamomum. To do this, I applied previously and generally accepted 
concepts of the genera Cinnamomum and Phoebe (Kostermans, 1957; Rohwer, 1993) in a survey 
of the morphological characters in the holdings from Asia for these two genera at MO. The aim 
of this survey was to find out how consistent the combination of diagnostic characters was in 
both genera, in order to reach a decision on the boundaries of confidence when applying these 
concepts to the species under study. Attribution of all nomenclatural types to either Phoebe, 
Cinnamomum or any other genus in the Lauraceae was determined checking their vegetative, 
9 
