Improvements in modern Science derived from the East. 11 



personal obseryations to India, Persia, and Japan. His Jmceni- 

 tales Exoticce contain the first distinct notices of many produc- 

 tiiDns of the East ; and his great work on Japan, published about 

 1720, to which, in the course of this memoir, we shall again have 

 occasion to advert, in comprehensiveness of plan and accuracy of 

 detail, has never been surpassed by any similar publication. 

 About the same time, many of the most interesting subjects of the 

 Animal and Vegetable kingdoms which the tropical regions of 

 Asia produce, were illustrated by Rumphius, likewise of German 

 birth, but agent for the Dutch at Amboyna; whilst the plants of 

 southern Hindustan were described by the laborious Rheede ; 

 and the works in which the results of their inquiries were com- 

 municated io the world, the'Thesaurus Imaginum and Herbarium 

 Amboinense of the former naturalist, and the Ilortus Malabaricus 

 of the latter, after furnishing Linnaeus with the means of charac- 

 terising and arranging a multitude of species, still retain great 

 authority, not merely as works of reference, but as recording the 

 history of many subjects, that have hitherto escaped the observa- 

 tion of modern naturalists. Of similar value, with respect to the 

 geography and local history, as well as the natural productions of 

 Eastern India, are the labours of Valentyn, chaplain to the Dutch 

 at Amboyna ; to the accuracy of whose statements every succeed- 

 ing traveller has borne testimony; and the voluminous " Inde 

 orientale ancienne et nouvelle^'' of this writer, which was published 

 at Dordrecht and Amsterdam, from 1724 to 1726, conducts our 

 narrative to within a century of the present time. 



The geographers and naturalists we have enumerated, had many 

 contemporary labourers in the same field, some of whom, as well 

 as of their immediate successors in the exploration of the East, it 

 would be equally desirable to particularize ; but this Introduction 

 has already extended to a length much greater than that it was 

 originally designed to occupy. We proceed, therefore, at once, 

 to the concluding section : — an outline of some of the principal 

 accessions to the knowledge of mankind and of nature, that have 

 been received, during the last thirty years, from the exertions of 

 modern science on the inuummerable objects of inquiry, which 



