NEED OF SUPPLEMENTAEY WOKK 387 



I am mounting them on slips of white paper, after floating 

 them in water, and taking out every fold or crumple. I add 

 a sketch of each organ to the specimen in all cases except the 

 manifest duplicates. I find the petals forming excellent 

 characters, and many specimens have ripe fruits which I 

 had not before seen. 



Naturally it was good news that the same collector, Inayat 

 Khan, was to be sent to Kashmir, while [Sir D.] Prain at 

 Calcutta was sending another to Sikkim. The existing Kashmir 

 material was in parts very incomplete ; Hooker therefore 

 determined not to publish until the arrival of the new collec- 

 tions, which moved him to assure Mr. Duthie, * It is indeed an 

 immense service that you have done for me and I cannot 

 thank you enough.' 



As to the need of full monographs such as this to supplement 

 the Flora of British India, he was very emphatic. Mr. Duthie's 

 edition of Strachey's Kumaon Plants (1906), the result of 

 a single season's collecting, showed eighty plants not in the 

 Flora of British India. Apropos of the threatened suppression 

 of the Saharunpur herbarium and botanist, which seemed 

 specially serious since the question was mooted of giving the 

 Forest Officers more botanical education, he writes (January 24, 

 1901) : 



That N. W. India should be without the means of naming 

 a plant by reference to a good Herbarium, would be a great 

 blow to Indian botany. As to the Fl. Brit. Ind. providing 

 for this, it is absurd. That work is a hurried sweeping up 

 of nearly a century of undigested materials, and is in no sense 

 a Flora like Bentham's Australian. It had to be carried out 

 in a reasonable time, and except myself and Clarke none 

 of my coadjutors was really well up in Indian botany, or 

 authorities, or works, or climate, or geography. It is merely 

 a crude guide to the extent and variety of the native vegeta- 

 tion of India. To have done Impatiens as it should have 

 been, would have taken the time occupied by any one of the 

 volumes. 



And as he wrote later to Gamble (March 2, 1903) asking 

 for the loan of a collection of Sikkim Impatiens : 



