Abstract:
A journey to New Guinea, New Britain, and Bougainville Island, August to October 1960, enabled me to study the fig-flora of these countries, which I had hitherto known only from the herbarium. That I was able to accomplish so much was due to the great help which I received from the Division of Botany of the Department of Forest, Territory of New Guinea, in particular to the Chief, J. R. Womersley, and his assistant, E. Henty, and to the Forest Officers E. C. G. Gray and K. J. White. The journey to Bougainville Island was made possible through hospitality of Mr. F. R. McKillop, Arawa Plantation near Kieta, with whom Mr. Womersley and I stayed. I tender my grateful thanks to these persons and to the Administration of the Territory of New Guinea which extended much hospitality.

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Mr. J. A. R. Anderson of the Forest Department, Kuching, Sarawak has, on several occasions, sent me duplicates of a Goniothalamus from Borneo which he could not match and which he wished to include for publication in his paper, "The Flora of the Peat Swamp Forests of Sarawak amd Brunei, including a catalogue of all recorded species of flowering plants, ferns and fern allies."   When I visited Sarawak and Brunei last year, July to September 1960, he again reminded me about it and showed me more sheets of it in the Herbarium at Kuching. It has been found in several localities in Sarawak and Brunei and is confined mostly peat swamp forest or wet forest with a certain amount of peat. Ashton obtained it from the Shorea albida swamps at Seria and Bukit Puan in Brunei where there is some sand in soil as well as peat. I looked for it in these and other localities in Brunei, but unfortunately did not find it myself. I am now describing it as a new species and have named it in honour of J. A. R. Anderson.  

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This paper deals primarily with the description and distribution of the Malaysian species of Knema outside the Malay Peninsula.  The Malay Peninsula species have already been revised by me in Gardens'  Bulletin, Singapore 16 (1958) but their distribution outside Malaya, if any, is now given with a citation of specimens. The descriptions of those species, occurring in Malaya, are not repeated, but some extra notes or new facts regarding them have been added if deemed necessary for a better understanding of the genus. The extra- Malaysian species had to be examined as well and are also revised here with full descriptions and notes on distribution.  The actual non-Malaysian species are so few in number (three species and one variety) that the additional task of including them in the present account was in no way a burden. Thus my first paper "A Revision of the Malayan Myristicaceae" in Gardens'  Bulletin, Singapore 16 (1958) when taken in conjunction with this one, will form an account of all the known species in the genus Knema.  In August 1960 I visited Sarawak and Brunei to make a special study of Myristicaceae in the field. The original draft of this paper had them to be altered to incorporate extra notes on bark and field characters with the addition of new records, a few new varieties and the change in status of one variety to that of a species.

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Book Review

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De Vol (1957) has reported confusion between the two species Ceratopteris thalictroides (L.) Brong. and Ceratopteris pteridoides (Hook.) Hieronymus in the identification of Asian material. Previously it was believed that Ceratopteris pteridoides occurred only in America, where it is found from 30N to 27S in wet tropical and sub-tropical habitats. DeVol found that plants previously collected from Centrel China, Tonkin, Annam, Cochin China and Cambodia are in fact Ceratpoteris pteridoides. Benedict (1909) used annulus characters to distinguish species of Ceratopteris. Other authors have assumed that Ceratopteris pteridoides could be separated from Ceratopteris thalictroides by its very poorly developed annulus consisting of a few cells only, without a stomium. While this is true for American plants, DeVol found that plants of both species collected from Eastern Asia all has a well-developed annulus.  Therefore it seems that this character is unreliable, and Ceratopteris pteridoides is better distinguished by (i) habit of growth with floating, not emergent sterile leaves, (ii) sterile leaves deltoid, simple, not repeatedly pinnate, and (iii) stipe widest at base of lamina and tapering downwards. Unfortunately these features can be only used for Malayan herbarium material in those specimens which have sterile leaves, or in which the whole stipe is in a good state of preservation. Fern collectors, aware of the importance of sporangial characters in other groups, have tended to collect fertile material only. Other features were sought to distinguish the wealth of isolated fertile leaves. By comparison of plants which definitely fell into the Ceratopteris pteridoides group sensu DeVol by virtue of their sterile leaf-type with those which fell into the Ceratopteris thalictroides group, two distinguishing features were found which can be applied to fertile leaves or plants which have been collected in isolation.      

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For sometime I have been defeated in identifying a sheet from the Malay Peninsula with decussate, pinnate, exstipular leaves and choripetalous, 5-merous, male flowers. It would seem that the choice was so much narrowed by these characters, that identification would have been easy. And though it is now certain, that it belongs to Phellodendron of the Rutaceae, it remains still remarkable that the leaves of this genus do not show the distinct pellucid glands which are so typical for rutaceous plants. There are indeed minute, pin-like pellucid glands (crystal cells?) in the parenchyma but of essentially smaller size than is usual in Rutaceae. It is true that Sprague (Kew Bull. 1920, 231) and Engler (Pfl. Fam. ed. 2, 19a 1931, 298) mention the occurrence of a large pellucid gland near each of the shallow leaf-crenations, but this appears to be frequently indistinct in the sheets of the genus preserved in the Rijksherbarium. See also Blenk, Flora 67 (1884) 278.

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In recent works on the classification of Ficus insufficient attention has been given to the names of subdivisions made by Miquel. These must be typified and re-introduced with minimum of disturbance, but a pre-requisite is a full understanding of all his species. The last to attempt this was King (1887 - 88), and he was obliged to leave many uncertain. Since 1950 I have worked on the revision of the Asiatic and Australasian species, using the large collection of the Singapore Herbarium as the study-collection, and, with the indispensable assistance of the herbaria of Leiden, Utrecht, Bogor, and Kew (for many of Miquel's types are in the Hooker Herbarium).  I have succeeded in recognising every taxon described by Miquel from forma to genus.  This series of papers gives the bare taxonomic results: botanical appreciation must await full publication. I should add that, until one can identify leaves in particular from microscopic structure, it is commonly impossible to identify many types. Hence I acknowledge with gratitude my apprenticeship through the Singapore Herbarium and my progress through the courtesy of the Directors and staff of the herbaria of Europe, Asia, New Guinea, and Australia, namely of the British Museum, Kew, Edinburgh, Paris, Florence, Leiden, Utrecht, Copenhagen, Berlin, Calcutta, Bogor, Manila, Lae, Brisbane, and Adelaide.  Thus I have studied over twenty thousand collections, not counting the abundant duplicates.  Further, in special matters, I have received great help from the herbaria of Stockholm. Uppsala, Geneva, Turin, Caen, the Arnold Arboretum, the New York Botanic Garden, and the Smithsonian Instituition. The funds for this work have come mainly from the Leverhulme Trust, the Nuffield Foundation, and the Royal Society. To all these persons and institutions, and to the many field-botanists who have joined the quest, I express my gratitude. Taxonomy, of course, is a mean to an end, and what I have in mind is the evolution to tropical forest as seen through one of its major constituents.          

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These notes are put together from material supplied by the Forest Department of North Borneo and the Forest Research Institute of the Federation of Malaya, and are now published to validate the new species, descriptions of which the authors had left in manuscript.

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Dedication

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Many people think of botanic gardens as public parks which to stroll amid pleasant surroundings and admire beautiful and rare flowers. Others consider them a convenient excercising ground for the baby or the dog, a good place for picnics, and, in Singapore, somewhere to feed the monkeys.

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It is a pleasing thing that the Botanic Gardens at Singapore and the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew should be celebrating in the same year, the one honouring 100 years of exitence on the present site, the other commemorating the 200th.anniversary of its founding. As we congratulate each other on the happy occasion and wish each other well for the future, it is also fitting that we recall the close bonds which have been woven between Kew and Singapore during their common life.  In order to understand how these bonds came to be fashioned, it may be helpful to retrace some part of the history of the gardens at Kew.

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Natural Rubber production in Malaya and other tropical Asian countries depends upon the cultivation of Hevea brasiliensis. This tree was introduced into the east and its exploitation developed through the agency of various botanical institutions and, as will be shown below, the part played by staff of the Singapore Botanic Gardens has proved exceptionally important. The changing fortunes of the rubber producing industry have reflected the trends of world economic history during the first half of the twentieth century.  Although during times of trade depression the plantation industry has done little more than provide a survival existence for its many employees, on balance natural rubber production has made one of the greatest contributions to prosperity in Malaya. This has been achieved in the first place by the attraction of capital and latterly because the inductry has become the largest single source of employment and revenue in the Federation of Malaya. At present rubber plantation employees number over a quarter of million and it is estimated that nearly 400,000 smallholders are supported wholly or partly by rubber cultivation. Direct taxation of rubber exports has provided about 15 per cent of the total Federal revenue during the last five years.  This figure was swelled by taxes on company profits and by other less direct means. This enterprise, which has given a livelihood to a large section of the population representative of all races in Malaya and provided wealth for the country's development, owes its origin mainly to the Singapore Botanic Gardens.        

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Efforts to learn about plants are called botany, when they are suffciently rational. Efforts to grow plants and make new ones and to destroy the harmful and unwanted are parts of agriculture and sylviculture, when they are sufficiently profitable. Our enjoyment of plants, wild or in the garden, has no name, but it is an aspect of civilisation as essential as art and literature; and horticulture is a sign of progress. Thus, in concourses of men, the academic, the applied, and the recreational sides of plant-lore have developed into the botany schools of universities, the plant-breeding stations of agriculture, the research institutes of forestry, the nature-reserves of wild-life services, the parks and botanical gardens of cities, and the flower-beds, window-boxes, vases, and books of the home.  Wretchedly barren is that community unmindful. In this concrete age, which hardens our lives, we should reflect upon the appeal of kampong, sawa, pasir panjang, gunong hijau, sungei berassau, and kayu chondong. The beauty of Rio de Janeiro, so inspiring to the visitor, is the city in the bay of forested mountains. Seeing then that botany, if we use that word for all ways in which plants enter our lives, is a subject vital to learning, practice, and recreation, let us consider the harder word taxonomy.

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An anomalous aroid was noticed in the collections made three years ago in Sarawak by Mr. J. W. Purseglove, then the Director of the Botanic Gardens, Singapore. It belongs to the group of aroids which shed off the upper portion of the spathes before the fruits are formed on the enclosed spadices. Since the sheaths of the petioles of its leaves are broad and produce long, tongue-shaped free portions, the aroids could be a species of either Piptospatha or Microcasia. In their general appearance and the way they bend, the spathes resemble those of a Piptospatha, and the spadix is fertile up to the apex or with an apex with sterile flowers. But in Purseglove's specimen the male flowers which occupy the upper two-thirds of the spadix have each two horns through apical pores of which pollen is shed; and bicornulate stamens forms a definitive character of a species of Microcasia. Hence the new species is assigned to this genus and named Microcasia purseglovei in honour of the collector. Hitherto only two species of this genus were known M. elliptica and M. pygmaea, both of which had helped to define the genus as having, among other things, a sterile apex to the spadix; but in view of the characters of the new species, the generic definition has to be altered to include also the species with fully fertile spadices. The two earlier described species were very tiny plants; but the new species is a very much larger plant in regard to the vegetative and reproductive parts.

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While arranging the material of the genus Ardisia in the Singapore herbarium, some new species or new records were noticed, while others had to be excluded from the genus. The status of some of these will have ot be settled by comparing the types; but the following notes are published here in order either to clarify some confusions that existed in the herbarium and also in the recently published literature on the subject, or to give a status to some of the names that have been adopted in the Singapore herbarium where the types and other speciemns cited in this paper are preserved. As originally published by Mez, the sections mentioned here were subgenera, but they have been treated as Sections by Merrill and others, an arrangement that seems to be more in accord with the present concepts of nomenclature.    

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In the large genus, Sphagnum, the degree of affinity and variability of the species occurring in South-east Asia has not been fully worked out. Professor Le Roy Andrews has made very valuable investigations and has indicated the synonymy for South and North American species, and has made some reference to species from othjer tropical regions.  Fortunately he was able to examine the types in the Warnstorf Moss Herbarium at Berlin-Dahlem. This herbarium which was entirely destroyed in the last was (Dalby, 1957), included the types described by Warnstorf in Sphagnologia Universalis (1911). In the absence of types for reference, the excellent critical work done by Le Roy Andrews before the destruction of the herbarium must form the basis of present day Sphagnum studies. In this paper an account is given of the Malaysian Sphagnain the herbaria at Bogor, Indonesia, and at Singapore. The classification of the genus in this paper closely follows that of Andrews (1936). A complete synonymy is not given but new synonyms are indicated. Other synonyms can be found in Warnstorf (1911).

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Among the many ecological problems awaiting solution in Singapore Island, is the rapid spread of introduced weeds on soil bared by land utilisation. In recent years Cleomeciliata Schum. et Thonn. has shown wide distribution, occurring as a weed of waste ground, manure heaps and in exposed situations along the drains of roadsides. This plant of tropical African origin (Hutchinson and Dalziel, 1927) is widely distributed both in tropical Africa and Jamaica. It was first collected in Singapore in 1927 and since then has spread rapidly over Singapore Island and is locally abundant in parts of the Federation of Malaya. In this paper some suggestions will made as the reasons for its rapid spread and its successful colonisation of exposed sunny land. Other features of ecological interest will also be mentioned.

Obituary