BOTANICAL MUSEUM LEAFLETS VoL. 28, No. 3 
SEPTEMBER 1980 
DE PLANTIS TOXICARIIS E MUNDO NOVO 
TROPICALE COMMENTATIONES XXVII 
FOLK USES OF COLOMBIAN SPECIES OF BRUNELLIA AND 
WEINMANNIA 
RICHARD EVANS SCHULTES 
Amongst the characteristic trees and shrubs of the Colombian 
Andes are species of Brunellia and Weinmannia of the Brunel- 
liaceae and Cunoniaceae, respectively. Notwithstanding their 
abundance in many localities, they do not appear to have been 
widely used in native medicine and consequently have not 
generally been considered as biodynamic plants. In view of the 
sparsity of ethnopharmacological information, the following 
few notes may be of interest and perhaps will serve to stimulate 
further ethnobotanical investigations and encourage phyto- 
chemical research. 
The collections cited are preserved in the Gray Herbarium and 
the Economic Herbarium of Oakes Ames, both at Harvard 
University, and in the Herbario Nacional Colombiano in Bogota. 
I wish to acknowledge the help of Dr. José Cuatrecasas of the 
Smithsonian Institution who has either identified or checked the 
identification of the material on which the following notes are 
based. 
Brunellia and Weinmannia belong to two related rosalian 
families: Brunelliaceae and Cunoniaceae, respectively. The for- 
mer family is monotypic, with under 50 species native to the 
New World, from Mexico to Peru and the West Indies; the 
latter, with about 25 genera and 250 species, is widespread in the 
Old World tropics and, with Weinmannia, is well represented 
with about 170 Andean species from Mexico to Chile. Both 
Brunellia and Weinmannia are well represented in the Colom- 
bian highlands. 
The Cunoniaceae are chemically not well investigated (Heg- 
nauer, R.: Chemotaxonomie der Pflanzen 3 (1964) 626). This 
lack of understanding is due probably to the sparsity of notes on 
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