i82 WILLIAM GRIFFITH 



work was accomplished. The twelve years of his official life 

 were filled with professional duties, difficult and dangerous 

 exploration, management of the Botanic Gardens, and the 

 labours entailed in making and caring for extensive collections. 

 It would not have been surprising had Griffith, in spite of his 

 attainments, contributed nothing to scientific botany beyond 

 rendering these collections available for other workers. He 

 estimated his collection of plants at more than twelve thousand 

 species ; and on his travels he did not neglect other collections 

 of interest. Insects obtained by him are described, he collected 

 the birds and fish in every district he visited ; indeed he was a 

 keen fisherman and must have thrown a fly in many a stream 

 that had not been fished before, combining sport and science. 



Griffith's collections were made with the definite purpose of 

 enabling him, when he had leisure, to produce a general account 

 of the Indian flora on a geographical basis. His methods of 

 collecting were most enlightened and subserved his work as 

 a morphologist and a student of the conditions of occurrence 

 of the plants, not merely of formal systematic botany. The 

 journals he kept on all expeditions are full of references to the 

 occurrence of the plants met with. He often adopted a plan 

 of roughly mapping each day's route and indicating the plants 

 and associations of plants, along the line of march. I wonder 

 if modern ecologists know of these records made long before 

 ecology was invented ? 



Whenever possible he seems to have examined the mor- 

 phology of the living plants, and he fully realised the value of 

 preserving portions of the plants in spirit for future examination 

 instead of relying on herbarium material. 



This quotation from a letter to Wight (then Superintending 

 Surgeon of the Madras Service), with whom Griffith kept up a 

 most interesting and friendly correspondence, from which I should 

 like to quote largely, may give an idea of his point of view and 

 also show how he looked forward to returning to Malacca : 



"If ever you go to the place of Podostemon endeavour to get 

 some germinating or at least very young plants. I can fancy how 

 an Acotyledonous plant gets a stem but how a Dicotyledonous 

 plant loses it, and becomes as some of them do, mere discs spread 



