14 REMARKS ON THE CALCUTTA BOTANIC GARDEN. 
stored with a good collection of botanical works, ancient as well as 
modern. We watched at their works the native artists copying the 
flowers as they blossom in the garden, and the pictures from whose 
pencils are accumulating thus annually to be deposited in the library 
of the East India Company. 
So soon as the sun’s decline permitted, we visited the garden. This 
was commenced in 1768 by Colonel Kyd, and has since that time 
gradually increased to its present size and importance. It then passed 
to the care of Dr. Roxburgh, who laboured there most successfully 
from 1793 to the date of his death, 1813. A small temple shelters an 
urn dedicated to his memory in one of his most favoured spots near the 
great Banian Tree; and Dr. Wallich has prepared a grave for himself, 
where his own remains, it is to be feared, will soon repose, if he does 
not try before long the invigorating influence of a more northern 
climate. That Banian Tree to which I have alluded, gives the stranger 
amore forcible idea of the vastness of tropical vegetation than any 
other object. The trees of milder climes sink into insignificance when 
called to memory for the sake of comparison. Its branches and their 
numerous sustaining self-united stems form of themselves a grove 
covering about an acre of ground. Not far from the Banian is to be 
seen a specimen of the far-famed and much-fabled Upas Tree. That 
its sap is virulently poisonous admits of no doubt, but not to the extent 
once believed, when that in Java was the only one and that imperfectly 
known. So far from the very atmosphere around it being rendered 
pestiferous by the exhalations from its leaves, I have frequently plucked 
them and handled its stem. During this visit I saw, for the first time, 
that most rare and most elegant of trees, the Amberstia. But two or 
at most three specimens are known to exist. No one who has not seen 
its mingled, graceful, pale-tinted foliage and long pendulous rosy 
flowers, can form even a proximate conception of its surpassing loveli- 
ness. ‘Turning to the waters of the garden I saw floating on their 
surface the classic flower of the eastern tales, the pink and white- 
petalied lotus. Around their margins were to be seen the pitcher 
plant, with its strange appendages of closed water receptacles attached 
to each leaf. Palms of various description, and among them that 
friend in the desert which spouts forth water when wounded with a 
knife. Passing to other divisions of the garden, we visited the potting 
houses, where annually thousands of specimens of rare and useful 
plants are prepared and dispatched to every quarter of the globe. Tea 
plants, superior varieties of the sugar cane, plants of madder (Calo- 
tropis procesa), a substitute for ipecacuanha (Menettia cordifolia), a 
substitute for the squill (Crinum Asiaticum toxicarum), quassia and 
guaicum plants, a substitute for sarsaparilla (Hemidesmus Indicus), 
fustic and a dye-wood abounding in tannin (Cesalpina coriaria). I 
cannot close this slight notice of the Botanic Garden at Calcutta 
without a further tribute to the merit of its curator, Dr. Wallich. He 
is by birth a Dane, and was a physician at Chandenagore, the chief 
Indian colony of his native country ; but the late Dr. Carey introduced 
him to the notice of our Government, and how well his scientific 
attainments merited such notice, is demonstrated by his published 
