The Mountain Flora of Java

REVIEWS & NOTICES The Mountain Flora of Java, by C. G. G. J. VAN STEEN1S. E. J. Brill, Leiden: ix -~ 90 pp., 26 text-figures, 72 photographs on 20 plates, 57 colour-plates with facing legends, 39 × 28.5 cm, cloth Gld. 140, 1972. So the mountains have come to Mohammed! Our text has been the Flora Malesiana. On the eve of retirement there comes this mighty epistle. Written from the calm of the polders, it unfolds the aspirations of vigorous youth and a thirsting mind; it is impelled with the zeal for majestic botany; it embraces the flora of the peaks of an earthly paradise--all that is left of the primeval grandeur of Java. A life-force inspires the scientific prose that future generations will care for as lovingly as the author has done this heritage. If the style is forthright, the compass is vast. We are taken at once to Tjibodas--and let us hope that, at once on opening this volume, the janitors of the mean lane and meaner gate of this Mecca measure them anew for a monument of such significance. Shallots, garbage, and a broken bedstead, admitted me last year almost to desolation. However, once past this unsightly ordeal, we are shown the mountains and their forests. We are sat down, as it were, in the new rest-house of Dutch solidity and told of the explorers who began the unfinished botany, zoology, geology, and meteorology, of the heights. Volcanos are portrayed from birth to ruin as they abound in Java. Plant-life is approached gradually, lest its complexity overwhelm. Climate, altitudinal zonation, floral biology, climax, succession, pioneer, nomad, and alien, lead through fire to the forests of Pinus and Casuarina. Sand-deserts, craters, mud-wells, death-valleys, lava-streams, and ashscrees, reveal the genera of south-east Asia adapted to the particular habitats. A pause with twenty plates of fine photographs make the paragraphs alive. Then the author plunges into the history whence came the plants on these peaks. He searches from New Zealand to Tibet, Korea and Japan. His early masterpiece on the origin of the Malaysian mountain floras is up-dated. There are detailed references to some forty mountains which he has climbed. 'Beauty and recreation come at the end of our list of arguments' not to destroy eternally what yet remains. Can Indonesia shoulder the responsibility, or will this epistle arouse the drowsy United Nations? The second part of the volume consists of 57 coloured plates, depicting 459 species at life-size. They have been superbly executed by the Javanese artists Amir Hamzah (deceased) and Moehamed Toha. Each plate has an opposing page with botanical names, family and short but sufficient and authoritative descriptions. Herein lies the special value of this work to biologists outside of Java. It is a guide, also, to the mountain floras of Sumatra, Malaya and Borneo. The printing of the plates is excellent; the botanical accuracy is the highest, as would be expected from the standards set by the author throughout his career. How the originals were made in, and at the edge of, the forest is one of the vivid interludes of the preceding text. Little grasses, great pitchers, twigs of trees, flowers, fruits and spiny stems, reveal their delicacy, their massiveness, their membranous and coriaceous textures, their hairs and their hues. I could not decide on the best.

This book costs about £20 or US$50. When one considers the exhausting labours of the author in the field and the years of taxonomic research throughout a long life, their cost, the photographic record, the artistry, the composition and execution of the large plates, and the finality of the whole, double this price might have been expected. Publisher, author, artists, and co-editor Dr Marcus Jacobs, must be thanked for this flawless and inspiring gift to botany. A very great work! The author, my friend Rasamala, whose botanical identity is revealed in the second photograph, says in a letter to this reviewer: '1 feel glad to have been able to write at least one real book in my life'. Who lacks this book is deprived. E. J. H. CORNER

(Cambridge, England)

Land Above the Trees, by ANN H. ZWINGER t~ BEATRICEE. WILLARD. Harper & Row, New York, and Evanslon, London & San Franciso: xviii ÷ 489 pp., iilustr., $15.00, 1972.

This is a superb book. Its subtitle, ' A Guide to the American Alpine Tundra', gives a general idea of its scope and nature. It is not obviously a conservation book, but is the kind of writing that helps to create the appreciation, understanding, and love of Nature, in the intelligent public, that is an absolute essential for conservation to be effective and sustained. As such it is probably far more important to the conservation movement than even the best examples of writing by conservationists talking to one another. Mrs Zwinger's writing ranks with that of any of the classical nature writers. The beauty of her expression is equalled by the delicacy of her drawings. Her husband's superb colour photographs serve very well to tie this almost lyrical prose and the effective, hut ethereal, drawings to the reality that she aims to convey. The first part of the book is a series of 13 chapters, together describing in satisfying but not boring detail the alpine tundra ecosystem. This shows, in its general ecological soundness, the sure influence of the perceptive ecologist who, over years of investigation in this above-timberline realm, has developed an understanding of the factors that control and the processes at work. The writer has given the ecologist's ideas a presentation that the layman can understand. The second part includes intimately-drawn chapters on six of the principal alpine complexes in the conterminous US, liberally illustrated with drawings of the plants that characterize them. The underlying similarities, as well as the regional differences, are well portrayed. The third part is a short, but very effective, chapter on Man and the Tundra. This indicates where Man fits into the system, its importance to him, and what he does to it. A better documentation for its conservation would be hard to write. 317

Biological Conservation, Vol. 5, No. 4, October 1973--O Applied Science Publishers Ltd, England, 1973--Printed in Great Britain