By all accounts, these two explorer-biologists appear to have 
had a great regard for each other. In the introduction to his 
posthumous edition of Spruce’s notes and letters, Wallace 
(Spruce, 1908) offered the following tribute: “... and I have 
myself so high an opinion of my friend’s [Spruce’s] work, both 
literary and scientific, that I venture to think the present 
volumes will take their place among the most interesting and 
instructive books of travel of the nineteenth century.” 
In acommentary of Wallace’s Palm Trees of the Amazon and 
Their Uses, Spruce (1871) wrote “... a handy volume, which 
contains the most characteristic representation of Amazonian 
palms that exist within a small compass.” 
During a recent visit to the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, I 
had the privilege of studying some of Spruce’s correspondence 
and notes relating to palms and their utilization, notes now 
preserved in the library archives at that institution. His precise 
accounts of aboriginal uses, many of which are still current 
among the inhabitants of Amazonia over a century later, are 
well worthy of study. 
Reading a letter to Sir William Hooker, written by Spruce in 
1855, I noticed a postscript paragraph in reply to Hooker’s 
query on Palm Trees of the Amazon and Their Uses. This 
section is reproduced in its entirety as follows: 
“You asked me about Wallace’s Palms. When he came down the 
Rio Negro in Sept. 1851 he showed me a few figures of palms. | 
pointed out to him which seemed to be new, and encouraged him 
to go on; I also proposed that we should work them up together, I 
taking the literary part and he the pictorial, which he declined. As 
I had also met with some of his palms and had my names for 
them, this caused me to relax in my study of the tribe, seeing 
myself likely to be forestalled in the results of my labors. —He has 
sent me a copy—the figures are very pretty, and with some of 
then, he has been very successful. I may instance the fig’ of Raphia 
taedigera and Acrocomia sclerocarpa. The worst figure in the 
book is that of Iriartea ventricosa. The most striking fault of 
nearly all the fig’ of the larger species is that the stem is much too 
thick compared with the length of the fronds, and that the latter 
has only half as many pinnae as they ought to have. —The 
descriptions are worse than nothing, in many cases not mention- 
ing a single circumstance that a botanist would most desire to 
know; but the accounts of the uses are good. —His Leopoldinia 
Piassaba and Mauritia Carana are two magnificent new palms, 
264 
