CABLK ADDRESS - MUSEUM, CHICAGO 
Field Museum of Natural History 
ROOSEVELT ROAD AND LAKE MICHIGAN 
Chicago 
January 28, 1938 
Dear Dr. Williams: 
Here is a list that gives about the 
best I can offer in the way of collectors. Some of these 
are excellent collectors, and you should be able to 
get something worth while from them, but it is probable 
that you already have most of the names. There are a go<d 
many others I could give you, but none of them seem to me 
to be very promising. 
Prof. Cardenas in Bolivia is an able collector, but 
I do not know his address. We have had a most unsatis¬ 
factory time with him. He has sent several interesting 
lots of specimens, well prepared, but he insists none of 
the letters we have sent have ever reached him, and I 
have given up trying to correspond with him. Perhaps 
the N. Y. Bot. Gard. can give his address—which varies 
from week to week. 
In Uruguay and Argentina we have several profitable 
correspondents, but they are all in regions where few 
orchids are to be found. In Argentina Burkart (now at 
Instituto Darwinion) , Cabrera,""and Castellanos are the 
best, and you doubtless have their addresses. There is 
also Looser in Chile, but he is interested in little 
except ferns. 
It would be worth while to get some capable collectcr 
(of orchids) into the eastern slopes of the Peruvian 
Andes. Ruiz in his diary writes of them as so bewilder¬ 
ing that it was hopeless to try to collect them. That 
sounds something like Costa Rica, perhaps even better. 
About the same conditions must prevail along the corres¬ 
ponding slopes of Bolivia and Ecuador. In such a place 
there ought to be enough material to keep a collector 
busy, and he will not accomplish much if' he tries to 
collect much besides orchids. If some one who knew some¬ 
thing of orchid genera and species would go to Costa 
Rica and give several months to these plants and nothing 
else, I believe he would discover a great deal there, 
in spite of the extent of the Costa Rican collections 
already available—they really aren’t so extensive, con¬ 
sidering the number of species known from the country. 
ADDRESS ALL CORRESPONDENCE, PUBLICATIONS AND PACKAGES 
TO FIELD MUSEUM OF NATURAL HISTORY, CHICAGO, U. S. A. 
