TORREYA 



May, 1915. 

 Vol. 15 No. 5 



BOTANICAL SKETCHES FROM THE ASIATIC TROPICS 



By Henry Allan Gleason 



I. Japan 



Every botanist who has studied or worked in his favorite 

 science in the temperate zone has wished for a sight of the more 

 luxuriant vegetation of the tropics, with its multiphcity of 

 species, its wealth of vegetative forms, and its varied adaptations 

 to the environment. Sometimes he has the opportunity to 

 gratify his wish, and he is seldom disappointed with the reality. 

 He finds the species just as numerous and as bewildering as he 

 anticipated, and their morphology and ecology just as interest- 

 ing, yet it is not exactly what he had expected. In the most 

 accessible and convenient parts of the tropics, and these, meas- 

 ured by botanical standards, are the tropics of Asia, he finds 

 that the dense and impenetrable jungle is almost as thoroughly 

 a thing of the past as are virgin forests in eastern America. He 

 soon discovers, also, that the unusual morphological and eco- 

 logical types are about as widely scattered in space as their 

 analogs in temperate zones, and that most of them can be ob- 

 served with far greater ease in an American greenhouse. Fur- 

 thermore, it becomes evident on his first trip into the tropical 

 forest or grassland, or along the seashore, that he must revise 

 to a very considerable extent his early ideas of the vegetation. 

 Every botanist of the temperate zone knows, of course, that 

 palms are seldom a conspicuous part of the tropical forest, that 

 legumes are very abundant, and similar facts of a general nature, 

 but it seems impossible to form from literature a clear mental 

 idea of the actual nature of the tropical vegetation. Whether 

 [No. 4, Vol. 15 of ToRREYA, Comprising pp. 63-92, was issued 12 June igiS-l 



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