HERMANN’S CEYLON HERBARIUM, 129 
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Hermann’s Ceylon Mr barum and Linnsus’s ‘Flora Zeylanica.’ 
By Henry TeıMen, M.B., F.L.S., Director, Royal Botanic 
Gardens, Peradeniya, Ceylon. 
[Read 2nd December, 1886.] 
THE collection of dried plants and the drawings of living ones 
made in Ceylon by Paul Hermann in the latter half of the 17th 
Century possess a special interest as being the first important 
contribution of material towards a knowledge of the botany of 
the East Indies ; but the premature death, in 1695, of the excel- 
lent botanist who made it, prevented-its becoming available to 
the scientific world of his time. Indeed, beyond the publication 
in his ‘Hortus Acad. Lugd.-Bat. Catalogus,’ in 1687, of some 
brief descriptions and reduced copies of a few of the drawings, 
Hermann himself printed nothing on Ceylon botany. After his 
death, however, some of his MSS. were edited by the illustrious 
botanist W. Sherard (for the benefit of the widow), and in the 
‘Paradisus Batavus’ of 1698 there are included some more of 
the descriptions and reduced figures of Ceylon plants. In 1717 
also there appeared as an anonymous tract of 71 pages a cata- 
logue of the Herbarium of Ceylon plants under their Singhalese 
names, no doubt printed from Hermann’s own MSS. This bears 
the title of ‘Museum Zeylanicum,’ and the editor is well known 
to have been also W. Sherard*. In the brief preface it is stated 
that the plants enumerated were collected either wild or grow- 
ing in the gardens of the natives, and pasted into three volumes 
without any order, and probably just as they came to hand. The 
editor adds that a fourth volume would be made up, and gives at 
the end of the Catalogue, as ' alix plante chartis non agglutinate,” 
a large number of additional names. 
The herbarium of which this was the catalogue appears to have 
been completely lost sight of till the year 1744, when August 
Günther, Apothecary-Royal at Copenhagent, sent to Linnsus at 
Upsala to be named a collection of Indian plants in five volumes, 
one being a volume of drawings. The great botanist was not long 
in discovering what a treasure he had in his hands—no other than 
Hermann’s own herbarium of Ceylon plants just as enumerated in 
the ‘Museum,’ with the addition of the promised fourth volume 
* A second edition, with a new title only, was published in 1726. 
t There are five letters from Günther to Linnzus in the correspondence of 
the great naturalist preserved in the Library of the Linnean Society. The dates 
of these are from 1744 to 1749. Two are written in Swedish and three in Latin. 
LINN. JOURN.—BOTANY, VOL. XXIV. N 
