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Berkeley, California
February 7, 1955

Dr. Carl Skottsberg
c/o Dr. E. P. Reed
Valparaiso, Chile

Dear Carl:

It was good to have yours of the 18th which came last week but distressing to read of what has happened on Masatierra. What a disappointment but no one could have warned you in advance because there had been no one there for years who could have appreciated the extent to which the invaders, animal and vegetable, had transformed the island. Indeed, you are really the only botanist who knew intimately and appreciated the significance of the original endemics. I hope that Masafuera will prove to be more nearly intact and the burning less extensive than reported.

Pisano writes that he has talked with you about the paper on Chilean phyto-geography which I originally suggested as a joint project when he was a student here a good many years ago. He is a keen chap with more drive and initiative than most Chileans but not a trained botanist. He went ahead with a plant distribution map and a preliminary ms based largely on Reiche and what else was in the literature. Where he got some of the species he used I never could discover, many names were in synonymy and some species were not Chilean, indeed not even South American -- this last probably due to perpetuation of errors in the literature. He, apparently, has no idea of the amount of Chilean herbarium material in this country and abroad, most of it never commented upon in the literature.

As I saw it there were two alternatives: 1) to publish the map after a revision based on preliminary herbarium studies and evidence our South American Expeditions had obtained, with notes on the general floristic composition of each of the subdivisions shown on the map to give a picture of the unique variety of plant formations characteristic of Chile as a basis for future detailed studies by ourselves or others; 2) a thorough cataloging and critical evaluation of all available herbarium evidence followed by field work in subdivisions where such evidence is lacking of fragmentary -- there are some larger and many smaller and exceedingly interesting areas in Chile which are virtually unknown botanically, as you well know -- leading to as complete an interpretation as possible of the past and present floristic composition of either a less or more subdivided series of phytogeographic units.

I tested the importance and feasibility of this second alternative by taking one of our Senior Botanical Garden Botanists to Chile with me in 1951-52. He studied the coastal vegetation, with emphasis on cacti, from below Valparaiso to Prov. Antofagasta and got back eastward here and there. He also spent a short time in the Cord. Mahuelbuta. In advance of going to Chile he worked in most eastern U.S herbaria as well as ours on what had been collected, particularly on the northern coast. Both the field and herbarium evidence he got showed that