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July 11, 1947

Mr. Harry M. Miller, Jr.
The Rockefeller Foundation
49 West 49th Street
New York 20, New York

Dear Dr. Miller:

Many thanks for your letter of July 1st. I enjoyed your visit a great deal. The opportunity to talk about mutual friends south of the border and to recall places and experiences made me a bit homesick for South America.

As I told you, my accumulation of detailed information concerning the character and distribution of the floras of the Andes, representing products of four botanical expeditions to South America, is one of the most extensive in existence. It consists of over 25,000 different collections of named herbarium specimens, over 3,000 photographs, extensive field notes and distributional maps. Supplementing these field studies are extensive ones made in this Botanical Garden where over 1,000 species of South American plants have been grown from seed, bulbs, etc., Scientific institutions in this country and abroad and private individuals provided $70,000 to make the South American work possible.

To have permanent value the accumulation referred to above must be further organized and analyzed and the results which bear significantly upon problems of plant evolution and distribution on a continental scale must be properly published. Presumably if I do not do the job it will never be done and certainly I should be able to do it better than anyone else.

I have in preparation a volume on the largely South American genus Nicotiana and propose to expand very considerably an article on the plant geography of Chile which is practically ready for publication and to follow it with an account of the vegetation of the Bolivian-Peruvian-Argentine frontiers. Another book which is in first draft deals with the plant resources of Argentina, and I have agreed to write certain sections of the Genera et Species Plantarum Argentinorum and, in addition, an account of the plant geography of Patagonia for the Anales of the Museum in Bariloche. Of special importance will be a volume fully annotated and illustrated on the routes of the four expeditions, the collections made and the environmental factors characteristic of the extensive series of vegetational zones and areas explored -- in effect a botanical reconnaissance of the west coast of South America, the Andes, Bolivia, Argentina and Uruguay. When the current expeditions in the oriente of Colombia and Peru are over and the products assembled a treat-