Natural Sciences of Philadelphia 
19 
us the privilege of sharing in the social life of the city and of real- 
• • « 
izing its many choice features. Popayan was the home of Caldas, 
the scientist and patriot martyr of the wars of independence, and 
later of the botanist Lehmann, German Consul and enthusiastic 
explorer. Indeed, our interest in Popayan, beyond the desire to 
study from so favorable a point of access the vegetation of the 
cordilleras, lay in the desire to collect for North American herbaria 
the many species of Lehmann’s, previously known only from speci¬ 
mens that had gone to Europe. 
We reached both the Central and Western Cordilleras from 
Popayan. The latter brought us into the most abundant orchid 
life that I had ever seen; but the former took us to the higher al¬ 
titudes which were more properly the goal of our expedition. As 
guest of Dr. Julian Uribe Uribe, we visited his cottage on the 
slopes of Purace, and from there climbed over the ash-covered 
paramo to the volcano’s crater, and as guests of Sr. Ignacio Munoz 
we visited the delightful hill estate of San Isidro, and thence went 
up to his cool forest ranch of Calaguala, and to the paramo summer 
cottage of Paletara. 
As one leaves the city and climbs the hillsides east of Popayan, 
the open or shrub-covered slopes give way but slowly to the cool 
highland forest, forming the zone which has been called temperate, 
not only from its mild temperature, but also because of the occur¬ 
rence at this elevation of so many forms of life characteristic of the 
far-away north and south temperate zones. With Melastomads, 
Rubiads and such tropical groups, one finds species of buttercups, 
geraniums, chickweeds, and groups familiar to us in the northern 
United States and Canada. A traveler from Argentina or Chile 
would have found even more that was familiar as calceolarias, 
fuchsias, and nasturtions grow in this cool zone, northward, high 
in the Colombian cordilleras, and southward descending to sea-level. 
The unraveling of the elements of the flora of the temperate and 
paramo zones of the northern Andes, explaining their origins, and 
the critical comparing of this life upon different cordilleras and 
isolated ranges, offer a most attractive problem both for botany and 
geography. 
But in the challenge to the mind offered by the composition of 
this flora, we must not lose the actual picture of the temperate forest 
as we saw it at Calaguala, above Popayan. I have seen the tern- 
