Volume 3

Notes of a botanist on the Amazon & Andes : being records of travel on the Amazon and its tributaries, the Trombetas, Rio Negro, Uaupés, Casiquiari, Pacimoni, Huallaga and Pastasa; as also to the cataracts of the Orinoco, along the eastern side of the Andes of Peru and Ecuador, and the shores of the Pacific, during the years 1849-1864 / by Richard Spruce ; edited and condensed by Alfred Russel Wallace ; with a biographical introduction, portrait, seventy-one illustrations and seven maps.

Richard Spruce

Date:: 1908

Credit: Notes of a botanist on the Amazon & Andes : being records of travel on the Amazon and its tributaries, the Trombetas, Rio Negro, Uaupés, Casiquiari, Pacimoni, Huallaga and Pastasa; as also to the cataracts of the Orinoco, along the eastern side of the Andes of Peru and Ecuador, and the shores of the Pacific, during the years 1849-1864 / by Richard Spruce ; edited and condensed by Alfred Russel Wallace ; with a biographical introduction, portrait, seventy-one illustrations and seven maps. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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$short - leaved Seringa. The former yields most milk, but neither is so productive as that of Para (S. brastliensis)} Both are straight, tall, and not very thick trees, with rather thin and smooth bark, and their average height may be about ioo feet. Near the Barra some milk is taken from a species common on the river banks (S. elastica?), but there is another species growing in the interior of the forest said to yield more milk. This I have not seen. The species of Siphonia I have gathered on the Amazon and Rio Negro amount to seven or eight, and it is probable that two or three times as many yet remain to be discovered. On the Uaupes I met with two trees (2427, 2479, hb.) of a genus apparently not far removed from Siphonia, which yield pure rubber, and are also called by the Indians Xeringui; but the single (not ternate) leaves and the clustered trunks (often as many as ten from a root) give these trees an aspect very different from the Siphonia.2 When I ascended the Rio Negro in 1851, I showed the inhabitants the abundance of rubber trees they possessed in their forests, and tried to induce them to set about its extraction, but they shook their heads and said it would never answer. At length the demand for rubber, especially from the United States, began to exceed the supply ; the price consequently rose rapidly, until early in 1854 it reached the extraordinary price of 38 milreis {£\ : 8 : 8) the arroba, a little over 5s. a pound. The extraction of caoutchouc_from the various 1 [The name Hevea is now usually adopted for the trees formerly known as Siphonia.—Ed.] '2 [In Spruce’s MSS. (Plantae Amazonicse) he makes these a new genus Muranda, and the species M. siphonoides and M. minor.—Ed.]$

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