BOTANICAL MUSEUM LEAFLETS 
HARVARD UNIVERSITY 
MASSACHUSETTS, May 30, 1978 — VOL. 26, No. 5 
CAMBRIDGE, 
De Plantis Toxicariis e Mundo 
Novo Tropicale Commentationes XXIII 
NOTES ON BIODYNAMIC PLANTS OF ABORIGINAL USE 
IN THE NORTHWESTERN AMAZONIA 
RICHARD EVANS SCHULTES 
This article continues a series of notes on plants employed in 
the rich ethnopharmacopeas of the Indians of the Amazon 
Valley — mainly in Colombian, Ecuadorian and Peruvian ter- 
ritories. The primary purpose of this series is manifestly to call 
to the attention of phytochemical and pharmacological re- 
search specialists the hitherto neglected but extensive knowl- 
edge of biodynamic plants amongst the aboriginal populations 
of these regions — a knowledge destined to disappear rapidly in 
the face of threatening or even presently active acculturation. 
Some of the notes in the following pages have come from my 
own ethnobotanical studies in the northwest Amazon from 
1941 to the present. I have, however, drawn also upon the field 
research of colleagues, especially upon the studies of my 
former student, Dr. Homer V. Pinkley, amongst the Kofan 
Indians of Ecuador and Colombia and upon the rich store of 
knowledge of my Colombian colleague, Prof. Hernando 
Garcia-Barriga of the Instituto de Ciencias Naturales, Univer- 
sidad Nacional, Bogota, Colombia. I have further incorporated 
into these notes several of the preliminary results of the Al- 
pha-Helix Amazon Expedition 1976-77, Phase VII, dedicated 
to Ethnopharmacological Studies of the Flora and Fauna of the 
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