Studies in Artocarpus and allied genera, I. General Considerations

Members of the genus Artocarpus are the most commonly encountered representatives of the Moraceae in the lowland forest of the Old World tropics (Africa excepted) apart from the ubiquitous Ficus.The genus also includes two important food-plants, the Breadfruit (A. incisus) and the Jack (A. heterophyllus) , which now have a circumtropical distribution as cultivated plants, owing to the efforts of man, which include, of course, the well-known voyage of Captain Bligh ending in the mutiny on the Bounty.The fruits of a number of other species are edible, some being planted for the sake of these, and many species provide valuable timber, although they do so in general as scattered members of the forest flora, for the only example of gregarious behaviour is that of Artocarpus incisus (probably little, if at all, modified from the original form) acting as a dominant member of the forests of the river-swamps of New Guinea.The genus Artocarpus is singled out by its compound fruit or syncarpium, which attains a large size in some species, notably in the two cauliflorous species, the Jack and the Chempedak (A. integer, frequently cultivated in Malaysia).The structure of this fruit has been the subject of special attention in this study with the object of determining the differences between it and the syncarpous fruits of two other small genera of the same area and alliance, Parartocarpus, which has frequently been confused with Artocarpus, and Hullettia, which has proved, somewhat unexpectedly, to show a relationship with Par artocarpus, having previously been placed in a different subfamily of Moraceae.A third small genus, Prainea, which is more closely related to Artocarpus than either of these, although the female inflorescence is not a syncarpium, is also included.It provided another immediate problem, since details of the leaf anatomy had led an earlier author (Renner, 1907 -) to unite Prainea with Artocarpus, necessitating a re-evaluation of his work and its extension to cover all the species here 1 This series of papers is based on a thesis presented to the University of Cambridge, England, in July 1956 for the degree of Ph.D."'The dates refer to the bibliography at the end of the paper.