8 A BRIEF MEMOIR OF 
There can be little doubt that Roxburgh must have made large collections of 
plants during his long Indian career of thirty-eight years. Comparatively few .of these 
can, however, now be traced in collections. It is known that his earlier collections in 
the Carnatic were destroyed by an inundation. He, however, made later collections in 
that province prior to his removal to Calcutta; and, during the twenty years of his 
life in the Calcutta Garden, when collecting was more or less his business, such an 
ardent botanist must have accumulated large quantities of dried plants. No Indian 
plants of his, however, now exist in the Calcutta Herbarium.* It is indeed asserted 
by Griffith, in his report on the Calcutta Garden written while he acted for 
Dr. Wallich in 1834, that the latter had carried off all Roxburgh’s collections from 
Calcutta, and that they had (without being distinguished by any identifying mark) 
formed part of the great Herbarium of Indian plants distributed to the chief scientific 
institutions in Europe, at the expense of the Kast India Company, under Dr. Wallich’s 
direction, A few of Roxburgh’s Indian plants are to be found in the Edinburgh 
Herbarium; there are a few also at Kew and the British Museum, and doubtless there 
are others in some of the great Herbaria on the Continent of Europe; but the mass of 
them cannot be now traced. The want of complete suites of Roxburgh’s plants is, 
however, greatly compensated for by the drawings which he left in Calcutta of the 
majority of the species named by him. Copies of all of these drawings were made 
at the expense of the late Sir W. J. Hooker, and were deposited by him at Kew where 
they can be now consulted; while many of them were printed on a reduced scale 
in Wight’s Leones Plantarum Indie Orientalis. | 
A few years after Roxburgh’s death some of his friends erected a monument to 
his memory on a little mound near the great banyan tree. The inscription on this 
_ monument, which was composed by Bishop Heber, is as follows:— 
Quisquis ades 
Si locus suavitate mentem permulcet 
Aut admonet ut pie sentias de 04 
Habendus in honore tibi 
Roxburghius 
Horum hortorum olim prefectus 
Vir scientiæ botanices laude florens 
Idemque ameenitatum agrestium 
Summus artifex 
Conservat cinerem Patria 
Hie viget ingenium 
Tu fave et perfruere 
D. M. P. C. Superstites Amici A. D. 1892. 
D. i | — а The portrait which forms the frontispiece to the present volume is a reproduction 
. (by the process of photographie etching by my friend Colonel James Waterhouse) of the 
t re ١ published in thirty-third volume of the Transactions of the Society of Arts 
sondon, 1815). | : ۱ 
оова number of plants, collected at the Cape of Good Hope 
i : during his last voyage to England, were presented to 
barium about twenty years ago by a surviving daughter, и i Я 
