From Steve Head
I much enjoyed Gail Vines’s Christmas story of the great John Corner and his use of monkeys to gather inaccessible flowers in the Singapore forests for taxonomic study (21/28 December 2002, p 72). As a Cambridge undergraduate in the early 1970s, I had the good fortune to hear Corner lecture to the Natural History Society on his collecting techniques, and one of the stories he told should be better known.
Travelling with mule and monkey on a narrow path in the uplands, he spied a new and unrecognised flower on a liana hanging from the path, down a near-vertical cliff face too steep for him to climb down. So he instructed the monkey to descend and collect the flower. But the monkey just looked at him questioningly with its head on one side.
Go down! repeated the eminent botanist. At which the monkey gave an eloquent shrug, took hold of the liana and pulled it up hand over hand to collect the flower. No human being, said Corner, had ever, before or since, made him feel so much of a fool.
Wallingford, Oxfordshire, UK
