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Henri François Pittier (1857-1950) arrived in Costa Rica from Switzerland in 1887. He worked in Costa Rica until 1904 and accomplished many things, including the establishment of the Museu Nacional and its herbarium (Standley, 1950). He left Costa Rica to take a position with the Bureau of Plant Industry. At first he was called a special agent but later his title changed to botanist. During his time in Washington he produced his manual of useful plants of Costa Rica and was the person in charge of the botanical survey of the Panama Canal zone (Chase, 1950). Pittier did not like the cold weather of Washington so he resigned his job and departed for Venezuela in 1919 to accept the job as Director of the Commercial Museum (Lasser, 1950). While in Venezuela he continued to collect and name plants until his death at 93. During his entire career he made important contributions to the study of Neotropical Lecythidaceae and to systematic botany in general. He made extensive collections and published on the Lecythidaceae of Costa Rica, Panama, and Venezuela.

Literature Cited

Chase, A. 1950. Henry Pittier in Washington. Ceiba 1(3): 138-140.

Lasser, T. 1950. Henri Pittier: a man with a dream. Ceiba 1(3): 135-138.

Standley, P. C. 1950. Henri Francois Pittier in Costa Rica. Ceiba 1(3): 129-135.

I am grateful to the LuEsther T. Mertz Library of The New York Botanical Garden for giving me permission to duplicate this information and to Sandra McNeill for executing the scans and my wife, Carol Gracie, for editing the scans. I thank the Botanical Research Institute of Texas (BRIT) for the financial support that enabled me to make this information about Lecythidaceae available online. Support from BRIT comes from the Andes to Amazon Botany Program (AABP) which, in turn, is supported by a grant from the Gordon Moore Foundation. I am thankful to John Janovec (Director of the AABP) and Sy Sohmer (Director of BRIT) for their committment to taxonomic botany and their willingness to provide funds to advance knowledge of tropical botany. John Janovec has been the driving force behind my desire to make information about Lecythidaceae available online, and I am grateful to him for inspiration and support. Finally, I thank The New York Botanical Garden for making my studies of Lecythidaceae possible.