Jungle Book

"A jungle, like a body, is a complex organism constructed of many parts which interact, which can be grouped and are yet dependent upon one another just as the skeleton, the nervous system, the blood . . . and other systems are in an animal. A bit of jungle breathes and grows and reproduces itself like a great animal." This is the thesis of Ivan T. Sanderson's new book, Living Treasure (Viking; $3.50).

Sanderson, a British zoologist who putters about the tropics studying small animals, writes this, his fourth book, with an air of cheery teatime banter which yet smells of good, scientific formaldehyde. It ranks him with such literate naturalists as Henry Walter Bates (The Naturalist on the Amazon), Thomas Belt (Naturalist in Nicaragua), William Beebe (Jungle Peace).

In Living Treasure Sanderson describes his little lizards and mice, not only with words but with his own drawings, which are artistic works of science. His interest in ecology--the study of the relation, always complex, between each animal and its environment--makes his book not merely a description of loathly and lovely beastlings from Jamaica and Yucatan but a picture of a darker and grander organism of which they are parts.

He shows how each tangled acre of jungle can be dissected into hundreds of distinct "niches," which vary--from treetop to root, from tree to tree--in temperature, humidity, vegetation, sunlight. Every niche has its animals, every animal its niche. Thus, for example, "If you know the distribution of either the forest, the malaria, or the mosquito alone, you will be able to predict the range and incidence of the other two. In fact, this applies . . . to any animals, plants, diseases, and so forth. . . ."

"There is," Sanderson also observes, "a vague but universal presumption that wild animals in their natural environment do not suffer from diseases such as afflict ourselves and our domestic animals." Dissecting warm specimens in the jungle, instead of pickled specimens in a laboratory, he found a startling incidence of internal parasites, anatomical abnormalities (e.g., a rat with one lung), tumors, deficiency diseases, etc. He believes that it would be useful for science to undertake a wider study of the diseases of truly wild animals in order to learn the control of disease in our own world. His book shows that patient naturalists can still find under leaves and stones a tropical American world as strange and dark as that which in the 19th Century pioneers like Bates and Belt found on a grander scale.

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