AFTER learning about the serious fires that are ravaging forest and farmland
in Indonesian Borneo and Sumatra, and the vast plumes of smoke that are causing
havoc in Malaysia and Singapore, it was refreshing to read of a less disturbed
part of Indonesia where the author was still able to see red birds of paradise,
bird wing butterflies and to have a sailing craft built by age-old techniques.
Tim Severin took an expedition to the Moluccas, or Spice Islands, to trace some
of the travels of the famous Victorian naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace, the
coauthor of the theory of evolution.

Wallace became a great naturalist through his extensive travels both in the
Amazon Basin and in the Far East, in what is now the country of Indonesia. He
roamed from Sumatra to New Guinea, spanning the width of the Indonesian
archipelago. He made his base for several years on the small island of Ternate
in the Spice Islands. It was from there that he dispatched both his now-famous
1858 letter to Darwin and his ground-breaking essay “Evolution by natural
selection”, both written on “thin foreign paper”.

Charles Darwin, of course, got most of the acclaim for working out the
process of evolution through natural selection. These writings, however, leave
no doubt that Wallace came to the same conclusion at the same time as, or
perhaps even before, Darwin. The theory of evolution was first presented jointly
by Darwin and Wallace at the Linnean Society of London later in 1858.

The Spice Islands, as the central and most important part of Wallace’s
itinerary, are thus at least one of the cradles of the idea of evolution. Tim
Severin decided to visit some of the places Wallace graphically described in his
1869 book The Malay Archipelago. Comparing the current situation with
that in the early 19th century, Severin’s text jumps back and forth between
their adventures and observations. This is done well and is not at all confusing
to the reader.

Severin had a local sailing craft, a prahu kalulis, constructed on
the small island of Kei in order to travel in as similar way as possible to
Wallace. The local boatbuilder was able to build the prahuwithout plans
and with primitive tools that have been used for many centuries. The 14-metre
craft was much smaller than those generally used by Wallace—who had a
horror of small boats. Severin did have a few modern adaptations: a satellite
communications system, a wind generator and a nine-horsepower motor for
emergencies.

Wallace has been acknowledged as a pioneer of environmental awareness. One of
his most-quoted passages, referring to the fate of birds of paradise, is worth
repeating: “. . . should civilised man ever reach these distant lands, and bring
moral, intellectual and physical light into these recesses of these virgin
forests, we may be sure he will so disturb the nicely-balanced relations of
organic and inorganic nature as to cause the disappearance, and finally the
extinction, of these very beings whose wonderful structure and beauty he alone
is fitted to appreciate and enjoy”.

Fortunately not all of Wallace’s prophecy has yet come true in the Spice
Islands. Severin and his team encountered many disturbing things that show the
environment of the region is under considerable threat, but they were also able
to observe many of the same animals and birds in the same places as Wallace.
They came across corrupt forest rangers who failed to protect nature reserves.
They found terrible pollution in the harbour of Ambon. This island was made
famous for botanists by Georg Eberhard Rumphius, whose seven-volume (1741-1755)
Herbarium amboinense described many of the region’s plants for the
first time.

On the whole, however, the results of Severin’s expedition would have been
pleasing to Wallace. Perhaps the experience at Kaboei would have excited him the
most: Severin walked in unspoiled rainforest with local ornithologists, who
listed 82 species including the red bird of paradise.

Although a considerable illegal trade in red birds of paradise is carried out
in Kaboei, the birds flourish. Each display tree is owned by a family group,
which has the right to take birds from that tree. If too many birds are taken
from a particular tree the population fails and the owners lose a major source
of income. A sustainable harvest has thus been taken for many years, and there
are more birds than in Wallace’s time.

On the island of Ternate, however, the future of the bird of paradise named
Wallace’s standard wing is not so certain. In recent times the population has
reduced from 300 to about 20. There is a larger population near Sidangoli on
Halmahera island, but it is not in a protected area and its future depends on
the attitude of the villagers of Labi Labi towards the birds.

These days many of the people of the places visited by Wallace have become
Westernised and acculturated through the advent of Christianity and Islam to the
region, but he would still recognise the friendly and helpful people who helped
to make Severin’s expedition a success as they had his. “There had been
something special about Kei Bebar forest . . . it was the harmony between man
and nature,” writes Severin. “On every side we had seen evidence of humans.
There were clearings, cassava plantations, villagers walking along the track,
the smoke of fires, the sounds of parangs chopping. But the creatures
of the forest appeared to be little disturbed. There were thousands of
butterflies; the birds came and went, almost ignoring humans.”

This is not a book which presents new science, but it is one that provides
background and insight into one of the discoverers of evolution. I hope that
some of the wonderful biodiversity of the Spice Islands will remain preserved
for future generations. While Wallace’s predictions have not altogether come
true for that part of Indonesia, he would be horrified by the sight of Sumatra
and Borneo on fire as they are today.

MANY people have been inspired by the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew: childhood
visits may well spark off an enduring interest in botany. As director of Kew, I
was heartened to learn that one of these inspired visitors is neurologist,
author and traveller Oliver Sacks.

A combination of visits to the gardens and lessons from an aunt with an
interest in palaeobotany gave him a lifelong interest in long-extinct plants
such as Lepidodendra and Calamites, as well as in those living
fossils, the cycads. These palm-like trees bear large, naked, poisonous seeds
that can be eaten, if carefully prepared by leaching out the toxins.

The Island of the Colour Blind is a fascinating account of Sacks’s
travels to four Pacific islands, interspersed with reminiscences and facts from
the author’s experiences in England and the US. As a neurologist, Sacks was
fascinated by the effects of isolation on the human population of the Pacific
islands. He decided to investigate the colour blindness shared by many
inhabitants on the islands of Pingelap and Pohnpei.

I wondered why I, a botanist, had been been given a book on colour blindness
to review, but soon discovered that Sacks combines medicine and botany in quite
an enthralling way. For nonspecialists, the text is very readable, and for the
specialist Sacks has added 86 pages of thoroughly researched notes and a
detailed bibliography to provide all the backup needed for further inquiry.

On Pingelap, Sacks studied a large group of congenital achromatopics, who see
only in black and white. He was accompanied on this part of his travels by a
Danish doctor, Knut Nordby, also an achromatopic. I found it moving to read how
the islanders warmed to this fellow sufferer. Surprisingly swiftly, new myths
began to arise that it was the visit of a Danish sea captain who had left this
recessive gene on the island.

The true story is that in 1775, typhoon Lengkicki struck the island, killing
most of the inhabitants. This disaster created a genetic bottleneck: only about
20 people survived. It is thought that the nahnmwarki, or ruler,
carried the recessive gene for achromatopsia. Today, about 5 per cent of the
population of Pingelap are colour-blind. In the world population, only 1 in 30
000 people has this condition.

On the larger island of Pohnpei, the isolated village of Mand is home to a
cluster of achromatopics. (I was interested to discover that, as is typical of
many local peoples, the islanders recognised and named about 700 species of
plant, which roughly matches the number of recognised botanical species on the
island.)

Sacks then flew to Guam to study a strange neurological disease,
lytico-bodig. This afflicts many of the older Chamorros, the indigenous people.
Among the varied symptoms of the disease are loss of recent memory, wasting
muscles, Parkinson-like tremors or complete immobility. Several different
hypotheses have been put forward to explain this disease. These include a faulty
gene or genes inherited by the sufferer, an as yet unidentified virus, the
damaging action of prions from another species on human prions, and—most
interestingly—the effects of eating the seeds of cycads.

Although Sacks does not definitely favour one of these hypotheses, he often
mentions the use of the poisonous cycad seeds as food, and fully describes how
they are made edible. The fact that the use of cycads as food is becoming rarer,
while the disease is mainly confined to the older population, would seem to
indicate that this diet is the source of lytico-bodig.

The travels finish on the small neighbouring island of Rota, where the author
is rewarded by the sight of forests of his beloved cycads. Sadly, as in many
other places in the world, Rota’s cycad forests are being destroyed to make way
for golf courses. It is a seemingly odd combination, botany and medicine, but
neither scientist nor general reader will be disappointed by the latest book
from Sacks.

The interest of drug companies in this living laboratory has waxed and
waned. During the 1930s and 1940s there was considerable research on plant-
based drugs, but this was phased out as the pharmaceuticals companies placed
more confidence in their ability to synthesise the necessary drugs. The late
1980s and the present decade have seen a great swing back to the search for
drugs from plants. There are several reasons for this change of heart,
including the failure of synthetic drugs to tackle some of the world’s most
important diseases, such as AIDS and diabetes. There is also a greater
understanding of the chemical variation within plants as well as a growing
realisation of the diversity of the rainforest and the need to justify their
conservation by making them pay. But above all, there is the realisation of
the race against time as deforestation progresses at an alarming rate.

The revival of interest in medicinal plants has produced a rash of new
books. This book is a particularly well-researched and well-written account of
contemporary attempts to find miracle cures from the rainforest. Although the
focus is on today’s medicinal plant explorers, Christopher Joyce puts this in
context with the history of the search for well-known medicines, such as
quinine and curare. He describes the work of botanists, chemists,
ethnobotanists, ecologists, government agencies and the drugs companies.

It presents a fascinating account of contemporary ethnobotany in the
Americas and takes the reader from the temperate rainforests of the Pacific
coast of North America, where the ovarian cancer drug, taxol, was recently
extracted from the Pacific yew, to the depths of the Amazonian rainforest.

In Amazonia much attention is given to Richard E. Schultes of Harvard
University, the father of modern ethnobotany, and to the work of many of his
students who have focused their research on medicinal plants. Joyce travelled
to Ecuador with ethnobotanist Bradley C. Bennett of the New York Botanical
Garden Institute of Economic Botany and so three chapters are devoted to this
first-hand experience in the Oriente of Ecuador, among the indigenous Quichua
people.

The peoples, their plants and animals of the rainforest and the work of
many researchers are described and discussed here, but it is also good to see
a book that addresses some of the ethical issues of the search for rainforest
medicines and is not confined to mere adventure. Joyce gives a lively account
of the adventures of many ethnobotanists well, but does not neglect the
question of who profits from this work.

One of the principal products of the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro
was the Biodiversity Convention which gives countries control of their own
biodiversity. Rainforest countries have, until recently, gained nothing from
the fact that many important drugs have come from their plants. Pressure on
the pharmaceuticals companies has led to their acceptance of deals in which
the countries of origin and their indigenous people will profit should a
miracle cure be discovered. One such deal is that between Inbio in Costa Rica
and Merck, a chemicals company. In this case, Merck has paid out a million
dollars upfront and promised a share in royalties from any commercial
discovery. Shaman Pharmaceuticals of San Carlos, California, a company based
on venture capital, is looking for pharmaceutical leads, mainly from indigenous
peoples. During the research, it provides assistance to these people and it
promises royalties should any drug be developed. I do hope that one of the
companies now operating along these more ethical guidelines discovers a drug
that will benefit the rainforest.

Joyce’s second theme is the conservation of rainforest. The presence of
untold quantities of useful products is often used as an argument for the
preservation of the remaining forest. There is no doubt that the discovery of
a few sensational new drugs will help this case, but the author is certainly
realistic about this and points out that overharvesting of a medicinal plant
can lead to its extinction in some cases.

He concludes that the advantages of medicine hunting in the rainforests
outweigh the drawbacks and makes a strong case for the ethical approach that
benefits local peoples and the rainforest countries. It is good to read about
this concern in an enjoyable text which will also become a useful historic
document.

Tropical rainforests have produced many crop plants which are now in
everyday use around the world. We drink coffee and cocoa, eat the fruits
of citrus, mango and banana trees, flavour food with cloves, vanilla and
cinnamon, nibble cashew and brazil nuts, build houses with wood from tropical
pines and drive on rubber tyres. These and many more crops that originated
in tropical forests earn a place in Tropical Forests and Their Crops. I
am also glad to see included some of my favourite, less-known fruits of
the forest such as the delicious cupuacu, a relative of the cacao, from
the Amazon, and the rambutan from Southeast Asia.

Although this book describes many of the bounties of the rainforests
in great detail and would be a good supplementary text for courses in economic
botany, that is not its purpose. The message is much more important: the
effect of deforestation on these important crops. It is not enough to preserve
these species in cultivation. Their future survival depends on a broader
gene pool which includes not only earlier cultivars, but also material from
wild varieties and the closest relatives of a species. Even unrelated species
become more important as techniques of gene transfer improve. It is the
wild relatives of crops which contain genes for resistance to disease and
pests, stock for use in grafting and characteristics to improve the properties
of the crops themselves.

Many tropical crops thrive best in areas far from their places of origin
where they are separated from the diseases that have evolved along with
them. For example, coffee of African origin is produced more by Brazil and
Colombia. African oil palm thrives in Ecuador and Malaysia. And the largest
production of the Amazon native cacao is now in West Africa. Many tropical
forest crops have been developed from genera that contain many other wild
relatives. There are 10 species of Hevea rubber in Amazonia but only two
are cultivated, while cacao has many other related species in the genus
Theobroma. The genus citrus has several dozen species, only a few of which
are cultivated.

The authors present a most compelling argument for the conservation
of tropical forests based on existing, well-known, woody perennial crop
species. The wealth of as yet unknown new crops and products from the forests
are not even mentioned, but then there must be many more medicines, fruits,
oils, resins and fibres still to be discovered.

This is a well-researched volume with considerable details about each
crop. The authors’ first-hand experience is obvious from some of the ethnobotanical
and local details about plants from many different parts of the world. A
feature that will be welcome to teachers of economic botany is a series
of maps charting the spread of crops around the world. It is interesting
to note the important role played by botanic gardens in the distribution
of these crops. Distribution maps, photographs and line drawings all help
to make this a most attractive book.

I hope that the appeal by the authors for much more concerted action
to preserve the plant genetic resources of tropical forests is heeded.
At present, the vast cornucopia of genetic material is being squandered
even though there are practical and economic reasons for its conservation.

Ghillean Prance is the director of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew.

ANY naturalist will welcome the continuation in print of Alfred Russel
Wallace’s masterpiece, which was first published in 1869. It is one of the
greatest travel, natural history and anthropological books ever written,
and it has been reviewed over the years by many distinguished people who
have each added their words of unreserved praise. This is a paperback reproduction
of the original American edition of the book and includes all the illustrations,
the appendix on crania and multi-language vocabularies.

Wallace’s greatest contribution to biology was as the co-discoverer
of evolution. The introduction to this edition by John Bastin informs us
that the so-called Ternate paper ‘On the Tendency of Varieties to Depart
Indefinitely from the Original Type’, published in 1858 by the Linnean Society
of London, was actually written in Halmahera rather than Ternate. Charles
Darwin has often been accused of taking all the credit for the theory of
evolution that clearly was also developed by Wallace. It is interesting
to note in the introduction that we owe the publication of this book to
Darwin’s persistent cajoling of Wallace to set down in writing an account
of his travels in the Malay Archipelago. This fact is well documented by
Bastin with many quotations from the correspondence between Darwin and Wallace.

Other useful information in the introduction includes a detailed chronological
itinerary of Wallace’s travels, needed since the book was written geographically
rather than chronologically, and the impressive list of the many editions
through which this text has travelled.

This was the third time that I have read this text; it did not disappoint
me and is still just as good reading. On this occasion, I noticed more of
Wallace’s equal interest in man and social issues in parallel with his account
of the natural history, which perhaps reflects my own increased interest
in ethnobotany since I last read this text. In the face of the contemporary
destruction of so much of the forests of Indonesia and the loss of so much
of the tribal culture, this account becomes all the more important for its
documentation of both natural history and ethnography.

Wallace was also the founder of zoogeography through his definition
of the line, now named after him, that divides the Malay Archipelago into
its two major biogeographic regions, the Sunda shelf and the Australian-New
Guinea area, each with its own special complement of plants and animals.
Many more recent biogeographical studies have supported Wallace’s line –
and his doubts about the relationship of Sulawesi to the other regions.

Today’s reader might take offence at the lively descriptions of hunting
and collecting orangutans and birds of paradise but these creatures were
not endangered at that time. If Wallace were alive today, he would be appalled
by the changes in the region as natural habitats are destroyed through Indonesia’s
programme of deforestation and transmigration, and the tribal cultures in
which he was so interested disappear. He would certainly have joined the
forces of conservation to protect the natural history and the peoples that
he recorded so vividly for posterity. As the destruction continues and species
are lost, Wallace’s account becomes all the more valuable.

Ghillean Prance is director of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew.