72 Pomona College Journal of Economic BotaHy 



more expensive a trip than to California, from New York) have we not 

 drawn on it more freely and widely? Besides all of the interesting, beautiful, 

 and valuable things in orchids, bromeliads, marants, aroids, palms, and other 

 plants which I have mentioned as growing now in the Para Garden, there 

 are also in the Amazonian forests wonderful displays of Melastomaceae, 

 Bignoniaceae, Passifloraceae, and other beautiful and interesting things, await- 

 ing the collector. Something of the extent of the Amazonian flora may be 

 appreciated from the fact that above 1200 species of forest trees are already 

 known from the banks of the lower Amazon, and Dr. Huber tells me that 

 even there great numbers of the existing species of trees are still unknown 

 to Science. 



It is not many years ago that a trip to the Amazon seemed a very great 

 undertaking but now New York steamers not only reach Para frequently, 

 but pass into the Amazon itself and twelve hundred miles up that river to the 

 city of Manaos, and sometimes the same steamers go on eleven hundred miles 

 farther to Iquitos in Peru, only five hundred miles from the Pacific Coast. 



Let us hope that our botanists and horticulturists will awake to the great 

 opportunities existing in that Paradise of Plants, and hasten to send down 

 trained men who can bring to us freely of the riches of that wonderful 

 country. 



