plants is extraordinarily extensive. This knowledge has, until 



irily because the area— rivers clogged 



rim 



with endless rapids and waterfalls— has by nature been pro- 



_ A * 



from 



bringing with them the availability of efficient and inexpensive 



medicine 



With 



most 



Amazo 



emp 



m 



Most of the material cited in this paper was gathered during 

 my 40 or more years of field work in the northwest Amazon. An 

 appreciable number of the ethnopharmacological notes are 

 taken from field notes of my students, many of whom have 

 carried out field work in the region. A few of the data have been 

 gleaned from the literature or from annotations on herbarium 



specimens. 



The literature sources in the following pages are the following: 



Glenboski— The Ethnobotany of the Takuna Indians of Ama- 

 zonas, Colombia (Instituto Ciencias Nat., Biblioteca J. J. Triana, 

 Univ. Nac. Col., Bogota, 1983); von Reis Altschul— Foods from 

 Little-Known Plants: Notes in the Harvard University Herbaria 

 (Harvard Univ. Press, Cambridge, Mass., 1973); von Reis and 

 Lipp: New Plant Sources for Drugs and Foods from the New 

 York Botanical Garden Herbarium (1982); La Rotta: Observa- 

 ciones Ethnobotdnicas sobre algunas Especies Utilizadas por la 

 Comunidad Indigena Andoque (Amazonas, Colombia), Corpo- 

 ration de Araracuara (1983). T. Uphop— Dictionary of Eco- 

 nomic Plants, Verlag J. Cramer, Lehre, Germany, (1968). 



fam 



Prantl system. The genera are listed alpl 

 familv. Most of the voucher herbarium 



mens are preserved in the Economic Herbarium 



m 



or 



Colomb 



256 



