26 ' REVIEW. [January, 



" He sent to Holland yearly collections of seeds and roots of the most 

 rare plants, and besides the famous collection of dried plants which formed 

 the materials of the ' Flora Zeylanica ' of Linnaeus, he sent home or gave 

 duplicates to his friend John Commelyn and others. 



" Whilst here he was assisted in describing the chemical and medical 

 properties of plants by Grim, who also \vi'ote a work on the plants and 

 minerals of Ceylon. 



" The collection kept for Hermann's own use consists of five large folio 

 volumes. The first three contain Ceylon plants only ; the fourth contains 

 Ceylon and Cape plants intermixed ; and the fifth contains the drawings. 



" Hermann retm'iied to Holland in 1769, and between this year and the 

 time of his death* in 1695, he wrote and published several Ulustrated 

 books on Botany, most of the plates of which were reduced copies of those 

 in the fifth volume above referred to. 



" He left an unfinished catalognie of the Ceylon plants, called the 'Musaeum 

 Zelanicum,' which was published at Leyden in 1717, and again in 1726 ; 

 the first edition having been edited by William Sherard, of Eltham. 



" John Hartog was next sent to Ceylon by Sherard, to collect plants. 

 He sent a collection of seeds to the Botanic Gardens at Amsterdam, and a 

 collection of Ceylon plants to Vossius, which, together with those given by 

 Hermann to Commelyn, if not even Hermann's own collection, came into 

 the possession of Dr. John Burmann, who paid much attention to their 

 description, and who in 1737 published the ' Thesam'us Zeylanicus,' a 

 quarto volume illustrated by 110 generally well-executed plates. This 

 work contains the descriptions, in Latin, of all the scattered Ceylon her- 

 baria referred to above. 



" The ' Musaeum Zeylauicum,' which was written to agree with the 

 chaotic an-angement of Hermann's Herbarium, is embodied in Burmann's 

 work. 



" Burmann is said to have been assisted in tliis work by Linnaeus, who 

 was then a very young man. 



" The plants of Burmann's work are arranged alphabetically, the botanic, 

 barbarous, and native names being aU mixed together. It contains a great 

 mass of useful information, but even for that period cannot be called a 

 scientific work. Ten yeai's afterwards (1747) appeared the ' Flora Zey- 

 lanica ' of the immortal Linnaeus. 



" Some authorities state that Hermann's own collection of dried plants 



* Hermann was born at Halle, and was employed by the Dutch East India 

 Company as a physician in Batavia and the East. He probably returned in 1679, 

 and became professor at Leyden, where he published, in 1687, a catalogue of the 

 plants in the Botanic Grarden of that famous University. In 1690 he published a 

 Flora of Leyden. He died in 1695. The date in the text is probably a misprint 

 for 1679. 



