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VII. On the Lycium of Dioscorides. By Joun Forges Royte, Esq., F.L.S., 
late Superintendant of the Hon. East India Company's Botanic Garden at 
Saharunpore. 
. Read January 15th, and February 5th, 1833. 
THE identification of the plants which constituted the Materia Medica of 
the Greeks has so long been a subject of interesting research to the most able 
naturalists, that any attempt to define what they have left undetermined, or 
to discover what has eluded their researches, and, still more, to differ in opi- 
nion, when they seem most clearly to have elucidated a doubtful point, may 
seem to many an act of presumption. But this will not appear so, when it is 
considered that the Materia Medica of the ancients, like that of the present 
day, was supplied by a variety of countries; and that it is only as these have 
been investigated by naturalists that the plants which afford medicinal articles 
have been ascertained: and as some countries still remain unexplored, the 
plants which yield us valuable substances, such as myrrh, in use from the 
most ancient to the present times, still remain undiscovered. 
'The success which has attended the investigations of Clusius, Keempfer, 
Tournefort and Sibthorp, who, to a knowledge of Botany, added that of the 
authors who have written on the Materia Medica of the Greeks, and then 
travelled in the countries where the same plants continue to be produced, 
encourages further inquiries in other countries, whence many articles are said 
to have been brought to the Greeks and Romans. 
India is one of the most remote of these countries, and that which has been 
within a few years so much investigated as to allow of a very good idea being 
formed of at least its vegetable productions. Little, however, has yet been 
done with respect to its Materia Medica ; but from the success which attended 
the efforts of Sir William Jones and Mr. Colebrooke in making out some of 
the plants affording medicinal articles, much may be hoped from the attention 
of others being directed to the same interesting field of inquiry. Having been 
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