The family of palms (Palmae or Arecaceae) is of major economic importance, both on a large industrial scale and in peasant agriculture. The palms offer a unique challenge to botanists because of their frequently gigantic size and unusual mechanical properties; they are of interest to evolutionists who wish to know how such an unusual plant form could have evolved and to ecologists who wish to learn about the distinct adaptive features of palms. In this book each organ of the plant and each successive phase in its life-cycle is examined, beginning with seed germination and gradually moving through the vegetative cycle to the production of inflorescence, flower, fruit, and seed, giving a general picture of how the palm 'works'. The information is presented in systematic form. Much of the recent extensive literature on palm biology is summarized and the relationship of the palms to other flowering plants is discussed. This book will be of value both to academic botanists and agronomists.

This book is not an exhaustive survey of known information in the manner of a text-book -the subject is much too big for this to be possible in a relatively concise volume- but presents a point of view. We are concerned ultimately with the analysis of tropical ecosystems, mainly forests, in terms of their constituent units, the individual trees. Many different approaches are possible in the analysis of tropical forests. A simple one is to treat the trees as obstacles which in a military sense intercept projectiles or are a hin- drance to foot soldiers (ADDOR et aI., 1970). A similar ap- proach might be adopted by an engineer confronted by a forest which has to be removed to permit road construc- tion. The timber merchant is concerned with the ability of a forest to yield saleable lumber. The interest here is in the size of the larger trunks with some concern for the kinds of trees. At a less destructive level the scientist aims to compre- hend the forest from many different points of view. The forester himself, in conjunction with the taxonomist, will wish to analyze the floristic composition of the forest and perhaps account for species diversity in an evolutionary time scale (e.g. , FEDOROV, 1966; ASHTON, 1969). The evolu- tionary biologist in his turn may be concerned with repro- ductive strategies in forest trees (e.g., BAWA, 1974), espe- cially in a comparative way.

When this book was first published in 1978, tropical forests were unquestionably the largest scientifically unexplored region of the world, and being rapidly depleted by short-term exploitation. Species were being rendered extinct at a rate that is probably greater than the rate at which they are being discovered. This book is an assessment of scientific knowledge of tropical tree biology - construction, development, physiology, reproductive biology and evolution - set against a background of community ecology and forest structure. Its emphasis is on the study of the individual tree as a living system integrated into the larger forest community. The book publishes the results of the Fourth Cabot Symposium held at the Harvard Forest in 1976 and presents the special knowledge of the participants, each an expert in a special field. Much of the subject matter is presented in the form of reviews, making information easily accessible to an interested nonspecialist audience.