A BOTANICAL BIBLIOGRAPHY of the ISLANDS of the PACIFIC by ELMER D. MERRILL INTRODUCTION by Reason of a War That Took Virtually T
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A BOTANICAL BIBLIOGRAPHY OF THE ISLANDS OF THE PACIFIC By ELMER D. MERRILL INTRODUCTION By reason of a war that took virtually the whole Pacific world for its battleground, interest in the Pacific Ocean and its countless islands has increased beyond measure. Islands and atolls that perhaps had never before been visited or explored by white men, at least by naturalists, became important military objectives, and information regarding them was at a premium. The war taught us how little we know about many parts of this vast region and served at least one useful purpose in stimulating scientific studies that may fill some of these gaps in our knowledge, particularly in the fields of natural history, anthropology, geography, and oceanography. The present bibliography is therefore a timely stock-taking of what has been published in the field of Pacific botany. Such an inventory should be the beginning of future important botanical investigations and research of the region, and I have therefore endeavored to make it as accurate and as complete as possible within its defined limits. The work is an enlargement of two previous bibliographies, both by the present author. The first of these, "Bibliography of Polynesian Botany" (Bishop Miis. Bull. 13: 1-68), published in 1924, contained about 1,300 author- entries, representing all the most important publications issued up to the end of 1923 which were basic to studies that might be contemplated on the vegetation of the Polynesian islands. The demand for this publica- tion was so great that it soon became out of print. It was therefore replaced, in 1937, by "Polynesian Botanical Bibliography 1773-1935" (Bishop Mus. Bull. 144: 1-194), which contained about 2,600 author- entries. The style was changed to conform to that of the much larger Merrill-Walker work1 on eastern Asia, which was then in press, a significant improvement being the addition of short annotations intended to give the investigator some idea of the relative importance of each paper listed. The same plan is followed herein. In the present work there are about 3,850 author-entries, nearly one- half more than were included in its immediate predecessor. This large increase is the result of the very active period, following 1936, in publica- tion of papers on Pacific botany, and of the critical attention given by the author in the interim to certain runs of horticultural periodical literature ignored by many professional botanists. There is no change in the beginning date, 1773, for no references have been detected in botanical literature pertaining to the region earlier than that year, other 1 Merrill, E. D., and Walter, E. H. A bibliography of eaatera Asiatic botany. i-xliir 1-719, 2 maps. Arnold Arboretum, Jamaica Plain, Mass., 1938. i 2 CONTRIBUTIONS FROM THE NATIONAL HERBARIUM than generalized observations on the vegetation or on certain economic species, in pre-Linnaean nontechnical,books on exploration, such as that of Capt. William Dampier in the latter part of the seventeenth century. The region covered in this bibliography is essentially the islands of the Pacific lying between latitude 30° N. aind 30° S. (excluding the Bonin Islands), extending from Juan Fernandez and Hawaii in the east to the extreme western limits of the Marianas, Caroline, and Palau Islands. It includes all of Polynesia and Micronesia and the eastern parts of Melanesia—as Fiji, New Caledonia, the New Hebrides, Lord Howe Island, Norfolk Island, the Loyalty Islands, and Santa Cruz— but not the larger archipelagoes contiguous to New Guinea, e.g., the Louisiades, the Bismarck Archipelago, and the Solomon Islands, except as papers essentially on these excluded areas have important specific references to the plants within the admitted islands. The Bonin Islands and other islands closer to Japan proper are not here included as they appear in Merrill and Walker's "Bibliography of Eastern Asiatic Botany." From the standpoint of botanical bibliography all the islands of the Pacific basin within the geographic limits mentioned above are now, with the present work, well provided for. This is not true of the great islands to the west, for apparently no sustained effort has ever been made to assemble a comprehensive bibliography of the botany of the vast Malaysian region. Borneo 2 is fairly well taken care of up to 1921; this was relatively simple, as that island does not figure in the botanical literature, with one exception, before 1839. The task of preparing a comprehensive bibliography of this great archipelago would be a stupendous undertaking, because of the vastness of the region covered, the historical aspects of the situation, the richness of the flora, and the large number of individuals who have concerned themselves with studies of one type or another for the past 300 years. Nothing is available on the Malay Peninsula except the citations in standard descriptive works. The most important botanical papers pertaining to New Guinea and its neighboring islands are listed by Lam.8 The Philippine group is reasonably well covered by my own bibliog- raphy up to the year 1926.4 Eastern Asia and Japan are very thoroughly covered to 1938 by the Merrill-Walker work already cited, and the junior author is preparing a supplement to it. In contrast to the 3*850 author-entries in the present work, the former contains about 21,000. As to type of material included herein, in general the policy is to list those papers in which genera or species are described as new from 1 Merrill* E, D. A contribution to the bibliography of the botany of Borneo* Sarawak Mus* Jour. 2i 99-136. 1915; A bibliographic enumeration of Bornean plants. Jour. Straits Branch Roy. Asiatic Soc* Special No., 1-63 Z. 1921 (pp. 2-6). * Lam, H, J, Materials towards a study of the flora of the island of New Guinea. Blumea It 1 IS—159. 3 maps. 1934, 4Merrill, EL D. Bibliography of Philippine botany: in his Enumeration of Philippine flowering plants 4t 155-239. 1926* MERRILL—BOTANICAL BIBLIOGRAPHY OF PACIFIC ISLANDS 3 the region covered; those in which transfers of the names of Polynesian species are made, with actual citations of the regions where the entity occurs; lists of species from any island or island group; all monographic works in which species of the Pacific islands are mentioned (but not those earlier monographic works where later explorations have shown that the group covered does not have Pacific representatives) ; general works that touch on world botany, of which the Bentham and Hooker "Genera Plantarum" and the Engler and PrantI "Die natiirlichen Fflanzen- familien" are examples; papers on ecology and phytogeography based on plants from this or that part of the region, plant pathology, forestry, horticulture, and some phases of agriculture; and books on travel that contain a reasonable amount of information regarding plants. Probably too many items within the field of popular botany have been included. Perhaps the ethnological field might have been more thoroughly explored, for various papers in this science do contain some information regarding at least the economic plants; but with all due respect to the ethnologists, most of them being untrained in botany and even in ethnobotany, it has been observed that the average botanical treatments are usually very sketchy and inadequate and that the nomenclature may be literally "any- thing that happens." Also included are such standard reference works as those of Pritzel and Jackson and the Index Kewensis. The natural groups of plants represented include not only the ferns and fern allies and flowering plants but also all papers dealing with the cellular cryptogams (algae, fungi, lichens, mosses, and liverworts) that qualify under the general principles above mentioned. It is suspected that in the general field of the lower plants there is much less adequate coverage than for the higher plants, for I admit that my knowledge of the special literature pertaining to the cellular cryptogams is merely general in nature. Definitely not included are papers on plant physiology, genetics, cytology, and morphology, although some of these may have been pre- pared by residents of botanical centers within the Pacific region, or are based on material originating, at least in part, within the area covered. Such papers cannot be considered as falling within the limits of any particular regional bibliography; and this bibliography is definitely a regional one. Perhaps the bibliography might legitimately have been enlarged by including the titles of certain important published library cata- logs, such as those of the British Museum (Natural History) and the Arnold Arboretum, for they do contain much bibliographic information that applies to the region covered; but such publications should already be well known to librarians and to professional botanists. In the field of systematic botany certain publications based on the vegetation of neighboring regions are admittedly of greater utility in actually identifying Pacific islands material than are the majority of the titles Included in this bibliography (except for strictly endemic 4 CONTRIBUTIONS FROM THE NATIONAL HERBARIUM Pacific genera and species), and among these might be cited certain Philippine, Malaysian, and Papuasian titles. In the field of economic botany nothing that has yet been published on the economic plants of the Pacific islands can even be compared in value with certain basic works appertaining to the economic botany of the great islands to the west, such as Heyne's "Die nuttige Planten van Nederlandsch-Indie," ed. 1 (1913), ed. 2 (1916-17), second printing (1937), Osche's "Fruits and Fruit-culture in the Dutch East Indies" (1931), Osche's "Vegetables of the Dutch East Indies" (1931), and BurkilTs "Dictionary of the Economic Products of the Malay Peninsula" (1935), for very many of the species included in these works either occur naturally in certain of the Pacific islands, or are introduced; and yet none of these works qualifies for admission in a regional bibliography such as this one definitely is.