JOURNAL 
The New York Botanical Garden 
VoL. X1 May, 191] 1910, No. 125. 
BOTANICAL EXPLORATION IN SANTA CLARA, CUBA. 
To THE SCIENTIFIC DIRECTORS. 
Gentlemen: For the purpose of continuing botanical explora- 
tions in Cuba, and for increasing our collections of the plants of 
that island, as previously authorized by you, I was absent from 
the Garden from February 17 until April 6, 1910, accompanied 
by Mrs. Britton and by Mr. Percy Wilson, Administative As- 
sistant. 
We reached Havana on April 21 by the steamer ‘‘Morro Castle”’ 
and there met Mr. F. S. Earle, formerly a curator of the museums 
of the Garden, now an agricultural expert of the Cuban Sugar 
Refining Company, who had kindly made arrangements in ad- 
vance for a trip through the Trinidad Mountains in the southern 
part of the Province of Santa Clara, a region botanically little 
known, and the examination of which was one of the principal 
objects of the expedition. 
A day’s delay being necessary in starting for Santa Clara 
Province, February 22 was given to a study of the coastal flora 
at the Playa de Marianao, a few miles west of Havana, where a 
number of interesting plants were collected, including a beautiful 
small palm (Thrinax) and very fine flowering specimens of the 
somewhat rare shrub Colubrina cubensis, of the Buckthorn 
Family. 
We proceeded by rail to Cienfuegos, on the south coast, on 
February 23; this city is situated on a large and beautiful bay, 
some fifteen miles west of the western foothills of the Trinidad 
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