If you want to get any _Lawrenceana_, you will have to send yourself, and as I said before, the results will be very doubtful. As far as I myself am concerned, I am interested besides my baking business, in the gold-diggings, and shall go up to the Savannah in a few months. I can give you first-class references if you should be willing to send an expedition, and we could come to some arrangement; at least, you would save the expenses of the passage of one of your collectors. I may say that I am quite conversant with the way of packing orchids and handling them as well for travel as shipment.
Kindly excuse, therefore, my lengthy letter and its bad writing. And if you should be inclined to go in for an expedition, just send me a list of what you require, and I will tell you whether the plants are found along the route of travel and in the Savannah visited; as, for instance, _Catt. superba_ does not grow at all in the district where _Catt. Lawrenceana_ is to be found, but far further south.
Before closing, I beg you to let me know the prices of about twenty-five of the best of and prettiest South American orchids, which I want for my own collection, as _Catt. Medellii_, _Catt. Trianæ_, _Odontoglossum crispum_, _Miltonia vexillaria_, _Catt. labiata_, &c.
I shall await your answer as soon as possible, and send you a list by last mail of what is to be got in this colony.
We also found on our last visit something new--a very large bulbed Oncidium, or may be Catasetum, on the top of Roraima, where we spent a night, but got only two specimens, one of which got lost, and the other one I left in the hands of Mr. Rodway, but so we tried our best. It decayed, having been too seriously damaged to revive and flower, and so enable us to see what it was, it not being in flower when found.
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....