Many countries nowadays have made strict rules (and rightly so) for collectors, partly for the protection of the flora and fauna and to thwart unscrupulous exterminators of butterflies and orchids, partly, we suspect, also as a check on industrial espionage. Obviously, administrators behind their desks have no inkling of what dedicated botanists (and zoologists) are doing in the forest. Especially when the scientists come from the so-called ’rich’ countries the civil servants ask themselves why anybody would like to exchange a nice chair in an air-conditioned office with a lot of paper work for a most uncomfortable, hard log under a leaky fly in an insect-infested, humid, scary forest. Since they themselves certainly are not going to take a look there for themselves, they suspect other motives, and until they find out what these are, scientists are under suspicion and should be kept on a leash. Sometimes the requirements border on the ridiculous, as a few instances that have come to attention show: Unicates must be left with the host institute and can only be had on loan. Well, one could live with this, although especially these collections are often the most interesting.