THE GENUS HEDYCHIQM. 11 



II. — Some Account of the Genus Hedychium. By X. Wallich, 

 M.D., F.R S., Knight Coinmandei' of the Royal Danish 

 Order of Daunebrog. 



(Repi-inted from the London Journal of Botany, by permission of 

 Sir Wm. Hooker ; with a few alterations by the author.) 



The genus Hedychium is exchisively East Iiadian, consisting 

 mostly of exquisitely beautiful and sweetly fragrant plants, which 

 flower in profusion during many months of the year, and espe- 

 cially during the wet season. They delight in moist and shady 

 mountain valleys, from China, where Rumphius was told they 

 grew wild, and the ]\Ialay islands and peninsula, where the first 

 species was discovered by that inimitable observer, and others 

 were afterwards added; to 30° north lat. in Western Hindustan, 

 where they are found at Mussuri and on the Suen Range, accord- 

 ing to Royle. In the intermediate countries they are met with 

 on the coast of Teuasserim, on the banks of the Irawaddy, in 

 Assam, very profusely on the Kasia (or Kasiya) and Kachar 

 ranges,* in Sikkim, and in Xipal ; less numerously in Kamaon: 

 also in Malabar and on the Xilgirries. Beyond their ornamental, 

 horticultural uses, for which they are eminently qualified, being 

 scarcely exceeded by any of our garden and stove favourites, I 

 am not aware of their possessing any marked medicinal or other 

 virtues. Dr, Royle mentions, in his Natural History of the 

 Himalayan Mountains, p. 385 — a rich treasure, not to be 

 met with elsewhere, of useful and important infoiination, 

 and of curious and successful research in matters of history 

 and literature connected with his subject — that a warm 

 aromatic root, called Seer, Suttee, and Kupoor-kuchree, in 

 the bazaars of Northern India, is produed by H. spicatum, 

 the Sidhuoul of Mussuri, and that it may perhaps be the 

 Sitta ritte mentioned under the Lesser Galangal, by Sir W. 

 Ainslie.f Rumphius, as well as Valentyn (probably from the 



* This is the correct mode of .spelling those names, accoi'ding to the 

 high authority of the Boden professor of Sanscrita at Oxford, Mr. H. H. 

 Wilson. The first is derived from the Sanscrita Kasa, being the tall wild 

 Sugar-reed (Saccharum spontaneum), so common on the jilains and lower 

 hills of Hindustan. The second name cannot be reduced to any Sanscrita 

 word; Kachar is Hindi, and implies land lying along rivers, liable to inun- 

 dation, and of easy irrigation. 



t Dr. O'Shaughnessy's Bengal Dispensatory, p, 652, quotes this obs^erva- 

 tion from the above work. In a memoir just published by Professor 



