Awaiting
your kind reply,
Yours truly,
SEYLER.
P.S.—If you should send out one of your
collectors, or require any information, I shall be
glad to give it.
One of the most experienced collectors, M. Oversluys,
writes from the Rio de Yanayacca, January, 1893:—
“Here it is absolutely necessary that one goes
himself into the woods ahead of the peons, who are
quite cowards to enter the woods; and not altogether
without reason, for the larger part of them get sick
here, and it is very hard to enter—nearly
impenetrable and full of insects, which make fresh-coming
people to get cracked and mad. I have from the
wrist down not a place to put in a shilling piece which
is not a wound, through the very small red spider
and other insects. Also my people are the same.
Of the five men I took out, two have got fever already,
and one ran back. To-morrow I expect other peons,
but not a single one from Mengobamba. It is a
trouble to get men who will come into the woods, and
I cannot have more than eight or ten to work with,
because when I should not be continually behind them
or ahead they do nothing. It is not a question
of money to do good here, but merely luck and the way
one treats people. The peons come out less for
their salaries than for good and plenty of food, which
is very difficult to find in these scarce times....
“The plants are here one by one, and we have
got but one tree with three plants. They are
on the highest and biggest trees, and these must be
cut down with axes. Below are all shrubs, full
of climbers and lianas about a finger thick.
Every step must be cut to advance, and the ground
cleared below the high trees in order to spy the branches.
It is a very difficult job. Nature has well protected
this Cattleya.... Nobody can like this kind of
work.”
The poor man ends abruptly, “I will write when
I can—the mosquitos don’t leave me
a moment.”
[Footnote 2: See a letter at p. 92.]
[Footnote 3: Vide “Orchids and Hybridizing,”
infra, p. 210.]
By the expression “warm” we understand
that condition which is technically known as “intermediate.”
It is waste of time to ask, at this day, why a Latin
combination should be employed when there is an English
monosyllable exactly equivalent; we, at least, will
use our mother-tongue. Warm orchids are those
which like a minimum temperature, while growing, of
60 deg.; while resting, of 55 deg.. As for the
maximum, it signifies little in the former case, but
in the latter—during the months of rest—it
cannot be allowed to go beyond 60 deg., for any length
of time, without mischief. These conditions mean,
in effect, that the house must be warmed during nine
months of the twelve in this realm of England.
“Hot” orchids demand a fire the whole year
