PREFACE. 



THE Flora of British India is intended to comprise within a moderate 

 compass brief descriptions, ordinal, generic and specific, of the Mower- 

 ing- plants and Ferns hitherto found within the British territories in 

 India, together with those of Kashmir and Western Tibet ; countries 

 which, though outside that territory, belong to botanical regions in- 

 cluded within it, which have been geographically and botanically 

 explored by officers employed almost exclusively in the Indian service, 

 and which are habitually visited by Indian tourists and travellers. 

 It was originally intended to have included the Floras of AfFghanistan 

 and Beluchistan, as was done in the fragmentary " Flora Indica," 

 commenced in 1855 by Dr. T. Thomson and myself; but the plants of 

 these countries having been recently included in Boissier's excellent 

 " Flora Orientals," and belonging to quite another botanical region 

 (the Occidental Asiatic), this intention has been abandoned. 



At the outset it must be stated, that in a work of this scope, neither 

 fulness nor completeness are attainable in the present state of science. 

 British Indian Botany is represented by some 12-14,000 species, and 

 by hundreds of thousands of specimens, collected over an area of one 

 and a half millions of square miles, in tropical, temperate, and frigid 

 climates, and at all elevations, from the sea-level to 19,000 ft. Of this 

 vast assemblage, not a twelfth part has hitherto been brought together 

 in any one general work on Indian plants. The descriptions of such 

 as are well described, are scattered through innumerable British and 

 foreign journals, or contained in Local Floras, or works on general 

 Botany; a very large number are described so incompletely or inaccu- 

 rately, that they can only be recognised after an inspection of the ori- 

 ginal specimens ; and very many are altogether undescribed. In short, 

 there is no quarter of the globe so rich in plants, and from which such 

 a mass of materials has been collected and deposited in European 



