CABLE ADDRESS - MUSEUM, CUICACiO 
Field Museum of Natural History 
ROOSEVELT ROAD AND FIELD DRIVE 
Chicago 
June 6, 1939 
Dear Mr. Ames: 
It is now more than two weeks since I re¬ 
turned from Guatemala, and as usual I have some favors to 
ask of you. First, will you he so kind as to undertake 
the naming of a few miscellaneous orchids from Costa Rica 
and Guatemala? Some are very good specimens, others not so 
much so. Of some there are duplicates. They have been 
sent bv various collectors, and the guatemalan ones (not 
my own) should be rather good. 
We are planning a flora of Guatemala, to be somewhat 
more elaborate, or at least more detailed, than anything 
I have published previously for Central America. It will 
include full generic and specific descriptions through¬ 
out, with pertinent synonymy. It is to be under the joint 
authorship of Steyermark and myself. For this will you be 
willing to treat the orchids, one of the most important 
groups of Guatemalan plants? The flora will be issued in 
parts. I hope to have the first part ready for the printer 
before the end of next year, but the first part need not 
include the orchids. 
Steyermark is going to Guatemala for collecting at 
the end of this summer, and will stay as long as his money 
holds out. He is energetic and should get a large col¬ 
lection, plus experience that will be useful in later 
trips to Central America. I don’t know yet whether I want 
tt> visit Guatemala again or not. I was there for six months 
and that is a long time to spend in the field. However, 
everything went off most agreeably, the people as usual 
were delightful, and I got more than 15,000 numbers of 
plants. 9 
I collected in all the 22 departments except Peten 
and Jalapa. The first I have no desire to visit; the second 
was missed more or less by accident. In most of the 
departments I collected rather casually. I have no very 
great collection of orchids—as usual they were not in 
bloom—but I do have some, and shall send you a set when 
the collection is labeled. 
Almost all parts of Guatemala except Peten are now 
easily accessible by automobile. If you should have an 
orchid collector that you could send there, I can tell 
him where to go—the bocacosta of the departments of Que- 
zaltenango and San Marcos. I have good reason to believe 
that for orchids it is superior to the Verapaz region, 
and it has been scarcely at all collected. It would be 
easy to collect there, and an orchid collector probably 
could make a "haul. 1 * I am referring to the wet mountain 
forest of the Pacific slopeat 3000-6000 feet.^For phaner¬ 
ogams it certainly is far superior to the Coban region, 
which seems to me to have been greatly overrated. I am 
ADDRESS A 1,1. CORRESPONDENCE, PUBLICATIONS AND PACKAGES 
TO FIELD MUSEUM OF NATURAL HISTORY, CHICAGO, U. S. A. 
