THE 



OF FICUS 



OF THE 



INDO-MALAYAN AND CHINESE COUNTRIES 



INTRODUCTION 



The genus Ficus was founded by Linnaeus, and in the first edition of his Specie* 

 Plantarum he described seven species, four of which are Indian. By the tim< 



edition of Linnaeus' Sy sterna appeared (1825 to 1828) the number of species 

 had risen to 118, of which 50 were from the Indo-Malayan region. In 1825 Blume'i 

 Bijdragen was published, and in it there are descriptions of 93 species of Mala} in figs, of 

 which 82 were described for the first time. Roxburgh's Flora Indica, although completed 

 before the author's death in 1815, was not published until 1832, and in it 55 Indian 



species are described. Of these species, 41 bore Roxburgh's name as their author; hut 

 only about 15 of them had previously been undescribed. Although Gaertner had given a 

 fairly good description of the achenes of F. carica and of F. religiosa, yet, between the 

 time of Linnaeus and that of Roxburgh, systematic writers had paid but little attention 



to the structure of the flowers and to the mode of their arrangement on the receptacles, 

 the species being founded purely on external characters. The remarks of Linnaeus himself 

 on the common eatable Fig in the Horius Cliffortianus (published five years before the 

 first edition of his Genera Plantarum) show that he had a clearer apprehension of the 

 actual arrangements of the sexes than most of the writers who succeeded him. In the 

 Hortus Cliffortianus Linnaeus reduces to the same species the Fig, the Gapriiig, and 

 erinosyce ; regarding the Caprifig as the male, the Fig as the female, and erinosyce a the 

 hermaphrodite form of one and the same species. In the first edition of the Species 

 Plantarum Linnaeus put the genus Ficus into his class Cryptogamia, but in the second 

 edition he transferred it to Polygamia Polycecia, thus confirming the view as to the nature of 

 the arrangements of the flowers of the common Fig which he had expressed in the ll«rtus 

 Cliffortianus. In his Enumeration (1806) Vahl put Ficus into Triandria M»nogyr\ia, thus show- 

 that he not only completely misunderstood the sexual arrangements, but that he could 



ing 



never have even counted the stamens. In Sprengel's edition of Linnaeus just quoted, Ficue 

 is put into a section of Monoecia called Androgynia, from the supposition that flowers of 



