Post #630756 by TikiTomD on Sat, Mar 31, 2012 9:46 AM

While we’re on an intermission in the RLS story in the “Tale of the Funk,” I thought I’d share another interest of our quirky medico, botany. Dr. Augustin Krämer extensively cited Dr. Funk over a whole range of subjects in his volume, The Samoa Islands: Material Culture, but especially on the subjects of native medicinal plants and meteorology. Krämer’s book was translated by Theodore Verhaaren and published by the University of Hawai`i Press in 1995. Here are but a couple of many citations...

Okay, that Krämer photo above has nothing to do with Dr. Funk and our topic of botany. It was included for purely ethnographic interest.

The "Reinecke" cited by Krämer was Franz Reinecke, a German botanist who conducted field research in the Samoan archipelago from 1893 to 1895.

For his botanical contributions, Reinecke named a rare flowering Samoan plant after Dr. Funk, Cyrtandra funkii. In his most recent compilation of rare Samoan plants for Conservation International, Art Whistler includes Dr. Funk’s namesake plant in a list of rare, endangered species that he recommends for the IUCN “Red List.” The IUCN (International Union for Conservation of Nature) is the main international agency concerned with endangered and rare botanicals and is headquartered in Switzerland. Cyrtandra funkii is on the bottom row of the lists shown in part below...

The Rare Plants of Samoa January 2011

Should anyone come across Cyrtandra funkii in the wild, please take a photo, notify IUCN (phone: +41 (22) 999-0000) and leave it unharmed.

-Tom