329 



THE GEEWIAS OF EOXBUEGH. 

 By J. E. Drummond, B.A., F.L.S. 



The genus Grewia has not been monographed as a whole '•' 

 since 1804, when A. L. de Jussieu reviewed it in the Annales du 

 Museum National d'Histoire Naturelle (iv. pp. 82-93). He there 

 enumerated thirty-three species, of which four were admittedly 

 imperfectly known : in several other cases he appears not to have 

 been acquainted with the plant, and had to rely on previous 

 writers for an account of it. 



In the Prodromus (i. 508-512) De Candolle (1824) followed 

 Jussieu's arrangement rather closely ; he reduced one of the 

 species of the Memoire, but added twenty-one new ones, chiefly 

 from the works of Eothf and of Eoxburgh, making fifty-three in 

 all. At the same time he noted that in the Catalogue of the 

 Calcutta Garden {Hortus Bengalensis) Eoxburgh had published in 

 1814 several other species, but without descriptions, and some of 

 these De Candolle apprehended might turn out to be identical 

 with species independently described by other authors. 



After Eoxburgh's death, his account of the Indian Grewias, 

 so far as he knew them, was pubHshed by Carey (1832), but 

 in this case, as with most of the large genera, what we have 

 in Carey, valuable as it is, does not after all present the text that 

 we should have possessed had Eoxburgh lived to be his own 

 editor. 



For example, in 1802 Buchanan had sent to Eoxburgh from 

 Nepal seeds of a tree which flowered at Sibpur in the spring of 

 1808, and this appears in the Flora Indica as " Grewia oppositi- 

 folia Buchanan." This tree is certainly allied to the Greioia 

 which Buchanan had originally styled oppositifolia; that was 

 collected in Mysore, as appears from a specimen in the Botanical 

 Department of the British Museum, and it is in fact the spe- 

 cies described by Wight and Arnott (Prod. Fl. Pen. Ind. Or. 

 p. 79) as G. emarginata ; the two species, however, are distinct, 

 and their geographical areas, so far as we know, altogether 

 separate. From a note by Sir J. E. Smith on a specimen of the 

 Nepal ''oppositifolia" in his herbarium, collected by Buchanan at 

 Simbu, May 18th, 1802, it appears that the original (Mysore) 

 oppositifolia was named and described in the lost appendix to the 

 Mysore Journals mentioned by Prain at p. xli of his Sketch of the 

 Life of Francis Hamilton {once Buchanan). Smith's note in 

 question cites Buchanan's work as Plantce CarnaticcB ; it was 

 doubtless proposed to publish it under this title. 



The Court of Directors of the East India Company decided to 

 make over the Mysore collections to Smith (v. Prain, I.e.), but 



* For the African species, see M. Burret in Engler Bot. Jahrb. xliv. 198 

 and xlv. 150 (1910). 



t Novce plantarum apeciex Indue Oricntalis, Halberstadt, 1821. The 

 material was mainly furnished by Ileyne and other Tranquebar missionaries 

 from South India. 



Journal of Botany.— Vol 49. [Nov. 1911.] 2 c 



