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Now a word about my collecting. I started out to collect originally for the Academy, with duplicates fo the Department of Agriculture, so that I could ask the staff there to identify the problem specimens for me. After I was in Mexico a short time, I added 2 other agencies to my list of recipients: one the Mexican Dept' of Agriculture, because it requires that, before any plants maybe sent out of the country, duplicates of all plants collected be deposited with them; the other, the University of Mexico, whose staff helped me identify many plants while I was in the country. So almost all my specimens, you see, were collected in quadruplicate.

Naturally, I was very anxious to bring back an extensive collection of plants with perhaps, a new species here and there for excitement. But I did not collect as much as I might have, because so many other interests competed with botany for my time.

The first was sightseeing. I must confess I am an indefatigable sightseer and Mexico offers a tremendous lot to the person who follows guidebooks: places of historic interest, buildings outstanding from an architectural point of view, remarkable archaeological sites like the Pyramids near Mexico City and the Monte alben and Mitla ruins near Oaxaca; artistic displays like the famous Rivera and Orozco murals, etc.

Secondly, Mexico as a workshop in social change is intensely interesting, and more than once, I took time off from my botanizing to find out what was going on in Mexico, on the educational, religious, economic, political or social scene.

But the most insidious source of temptation away from botany was the native life itself. We visited the markets to see and taste at first hand Mexico's foods—especially the fruits and vegetables strange to us: mango, mamey, zapote, jicama, chirimoya, etc.—and to observe the Indians in their colorful costumes. We attended fiestas where we might see the picturesque native dancers; we went to the homes of the natives to watch them work at the varied handicrafts like weaving, pottery making, wood carving etc.

Mr. Langman, who had agreed originally to help take pictures of the Mexican plants, became so entranced by these other aspects of Mexican life that I'm afraid the botanical end of the photography suffered considerably. In short, we were on this trip again, more the tourists than the botanists—at no time did we camp out; we always returned to our hotel or boarding house for our evening meal and a comfortable bed. We took no trips on horseback or burro and all our hiking was done on wagon roads or on well-traveled trails.

When all these points are taken into account, and are added to the fact that in most of the places where we lived there is no rain from October to May, and the marked decrease, therefore, in the number of plants in flower, it is not surprising that my total collection for the year was quite small (less than a 1000 different species) most of them however in quadruplicate, as I have already mentioned.