SOME BOOKS FROM COLOMBIA 
When in Bogota in 1917 I had opportunity to search for bo- 
tanical hooks. While I was rewarded by few findings and perhaps 
none of these of much value to a professional book-hunter, still 
the four works discovered and brought back with me scem to have 
been nearly or quite unknown in this country. The first and third 
contain descriptions of species published as new to science, and 
none of these were entered in the Card-Index, our standard for 
the enumeration of new species of American plants. 
First and most important is the ‘Flora de Colombia,” pub- 
lished in Bogotd in 1897. This is by Santiago Cortés, a native 
Colombian whom I had the pleasure of meeting there. Prof. 
H. H. Rusby, who had left me in Bogot4 in August, had taken 
with him the last copy for sale at the Libreria Colombiana, the 
main bookstore. My copy is from Sr. Cortés himself and is now 
much worn, both from his own long usage and from my six months’ 
use of it while traveling through the country. It seems strange, 
really almost unbelievable, that a work of such scope and so well 
deserving wide recognition should apparently have remained 
absolutely unknown to botanists in the United States until our 
very recent expedition. 
The copy before me, of 286 pages, is marked ‘“volumen pri- 
mero,” and was designed as but the beginning of a very elaborate 
comprehensive treatise of the flora of Colombia. But immedi- 
ately after 1897 came several years of revolution, depleting the 
country, and scientific undertakings are so remote from economic 
life that they suffer severely at such times. So itis that of Cortés’ 
flora five volumes remain unpublished. An additional adver- 
tising page, which would be number 287, informs us of the scope 
Planned for each of the other volumes. These include a series 
of systematic monographs of families for their purely scientific 
interest, accounts of species for their medical or industrial value, 
a complete enumeration of species with geographic and popular 
information, and lastly an atlas with chromo-lithographs and 
cngravings in black. All his life Sr. Cortés has been an enthu- 
siastic amateur artist of plants, and at his home he showed me a 
