MORE PLANTS FOR MAN 505 



portant fiber-yielding species of commerce, were known and grown by Mayan 

 and Aztec Indians. Yet among the several hundred agaves known today, many 

 of which were unknown to those Indians, there may well be producers of 

 better fiber. 



Botanists have classified our plants so that we may recognize one from 

 another and associate whole groups of related kinds, but what potential use 

 the greater proportion of these may have for man is basically still a matter 

 for investigation. Unfortunately, many botanists today too frequently isolate 

 themselves from studies of economic species as though this casts some sort 

 of stigma upon them or upon their profession. On the contrary, the facts 

 of plant life are just as worthy of study when based upon an economic group 

 as otherwise, and have the added advantage of enabling the scientist to relate 

 himself and his work better to the public in general. 



Every beginning science student learns that living plants are nature's 

 primary chemical factories in which a multitude of different organic com- 

 pounds are manufactured. Many of these compounds, like quinine, are highly 

 complex, and their artificial synthesis may be seemingly impossible or eco- 

 nomically unsound. Other compounds, like indigo, have proven of easy com- 

 mercial synthesis so the plants which originally supplied them are no longer 

 grown as crops. Unfortunately for mankind, plants have no advertising agen- 

 cies to promote a market for the mine of still unknown and hidden compounds 

 which are available as by-products of their daily metabolism. Modern civiliza- 

 tion has tapped the more obvious end products, but undoubtedly many un- 

 known chemical substances lie waiting the day they can be recognized and 

 put to use. 



Thus a new era of plant investigation appears to be beginning wherein 

 there is not so much concern with the obvious end products of flower, stem, 

 root, or leaf, but rather with the chemical constituents that the plant pro- 

 duces as it grows in nature and how these constituents may be used. We are 

 beginning to be aware of compounds in plants which, though perhaps chemi- 

 cally related, are far more subtle in that their mere presence when taken in- 

 ternally may affect the secretion of hormones or may affect the human nervous 

 system in ways still largely to be determined. It is in this field that more 

 plants for man will be found. Some will become important directly to agricul- 

 ture as new crops, while others will have an indirect import in the contribu- 

 tion of the knowledge of useful new compounds to chemistry. 



Today there is still much to be desired in the line of a coordinated and 

 concerted effort to discover new sources of utility in plants. Coordination is 

 emphasized because much, indeed practically all, of what we have learned 

 in this field has come by chance. For example, within but a decade or two 

 we stumbled upon certain plants whose rotenone content has immense in- 

 secticidal value, yet these species have been known and used as fish poisons 

 by primitive tropical peoples for hundreds of years. Curare, that South Ameri- 



