SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION 
UNITED STATES NATIONAL MUSEUM 
WASHINGTON, D. C. 
May 9, 1923. 
Mr. Oakes Ames, 
355 Commonwealth Avenue, 
Boston, Massachusetts . 
Bear Mr. Ames: 
Yor letter with regard to the proposed collecting 
trip to Central America is most satisfactory to me for 
the reasons stated in my former letter. I shall assume 
then that I shall go to Costa Rica this next winter, in 
case conditions are favorable. I am sure that it will 
he possible to obtain a large amount of useful material 
there, and I hope that in the case of the orchids it 
may be possible to obtain something that is really worth 
wh i le . 
Your fourth number of the Schedulae Orchidianae 
arrived yesterday, and I am glad to see that you have 
found the recent Costa Rican collections so interesting. 
The Germans seem to have taken a great interest recently 
in Mexican and Central American plants, for what reason I 
do not know. I fully agree with you as to the desira¬ 
bility of having the critical w T ork upon the flora of those 
countries done in the United States, so far as possible. 
As a matter of fact, I do not believe that they are re¬ 
ceiving much material from that region at the present 
time, but are working over the older collections with 
which there remains still a great deal to be done. 
In view of the present conditions, I am not in any 
hurry about beginning the publication of the flora of Cen¬ 
tral America. So much exploration is going on there at 
the present time that it seems better to wait a little 
before beginning publication, since our knowledge of the 
region is progressing rapidly, and it seems desirable to 
have the flora as complete as possible when it is pub¬ 
lished. As a matter of fact, we are at the present time 
somewhat limited as to funds for publication of botanical 
and other papers, and I do not think that it would be 
possible to begin the printing of the flora in the very 
near future. 
