PREFACE. 
In the year 1768, John Gerard. Koenig, a native of Denmark, a pu- 
pil of Linnzus, and an enthusiastic cultivator of natural science, landed 
in India, as physician to the Tranquebar missions. His example and 
instruetions diffused a similar taste among his companions, and hence 
originated the botanical labours of the society of “ United Brothers.” 
_ These men, so well known and highly esteemed in Europe for their dis- 
interested exertions towards the advancement of Botany, studied the - 
science as a recreation from the more important, as well as more labo- 
rious, duties of instructing the natives of India in the wisdom of the 
west, and of thus fitting them to become partakers of the promises of the 
Gospel. 
But although it may be said that scientific botany took its rise in - * 
India from Koenig, the flora of the country had not been entirely ne- 
glected by European botanists prior to that period, as the works of - 
Rheede, Rumphius, Plukenet, the two Burmanns, and finally a large — 
and well preserved, yet unfortunately almost unknown, collection of = 
Indian plants in the Oxford herbarium, formed in the early part of the oo 
eighteenth century, amply testify. e 
The Hortus Malabaricus was undertaken 2 at the suggestion of Henry e 
van Rheede, a Dutch Governor of Malabar; the specimens were col- — 
lected in 1674 and 1675 by the Bramins, and sent to Cochin, where — — 
drawings of them were executed by Matheus, a Carmelite and mission 
ary: corresponding descriptions were at the same time made in the — 
. Malabar language, which were afterwards translated into Portuguese by 2 
Emanuel Carneiro, a Cochin interpreter, and from that into L ; 
Hermann van Douep, the secretary to the city of Cochin: the wh e 
was under the superintendence of Casearius, a missionary there. The — — 
work was at length published at Amsterdam between 1686 and 1703, in — 
12 volumes folio, with 794 plates, and was edited by. Commelyn, who — 2 
_ has occasionally added remarks on the plants. The figures in general - 
=e represent the habit so accurately, that there is seldom any difficulty in 
. identifying them with the Hu they are e intended to represent ; n ; 
