176 NOTICE OF BOTANICAL PUBLICATIONS. 
quoted in support of particular statements, such as Cababa, 
Gynandropsis, Polanisia, &c., not one of which, although all 
common plants, may be known to the majority of readers, 
the ‘Illustrations’ alone can afford but little assistance to- 
wards acquiring a correct knowledge of the peculiarities they 
are intended to explain: this information I am desirous of | 
communicating through the aid of additional figures. Again, 
when treating of the * Properties and Uses of Plants,’ many - 
are mentioned as meriting attention on those accounts, but | 
of whose forms the name communicates no definite idea. — 
—For want of figures, Dr Ainslie’s * Materia Medica $5 
Hindostan, the compilation of which cost him nearly twenty 
years of incessant application and research, remains to this 
day little better than a monument of abortive labour, so few — 
persons, of the many in this country who consult it, posses- — 
sing sufficient acquaintance with the plants named to be 
able to recognise them even when laid before them, and fewer 
still to go in search of them when wanted. Hence, of 
nearly five hundred species of plants included in that work, 
as used for medicine, food, or in the arts, scarcely one-tenth 
is known to Europeans, and perhaps not more than a third to 
natives generally; and, of the latter, unbotanical readers have 
no other means of acquiring a knowledge than through de 
oral communications of natives, whose acquaintance with the 
plants indicated, being entirely traditional, without any guide — 
to direct them always to the same plant, is as likely tobe — 
wrong as right." To supply, then, an accurate book of refer- 
ence, containing correct delineationsof all usefulplants,soasto — 
establish the native nameson a correct basis, is another and not 
the least important purpose of these figures.—‘* The grand | z 
object of this work,” Dr Wight concludes in his Prospectus, - | 
(from which we have been quoting,) * may be summed up » 
a few words; viz., to give to India (so far as the limited re- 
sources of a private individualwill permit), that which England - 
has so long enjoyed in ‘Smith’s English Botany, a standard 
botanical book of reference, by the publication of correct figures 
of as many Indian Plants as I possibly can, and in the short- 
