PREFACE. 
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Tue hundredth anniversary of the death of the founder of this Garden appears to 
be an appropriate occasion for putting on record as much as can now be traced of his 
career, and of the early history of the Garden itself. Robert Kyd belonged to an old 
Forfarshire family, several members of which had preceded him in the service of the 
Honourable East India Company. He was born’ in 1746. At the age of eighteen 
he became a cadet of the Bengal Engineers, and on the 27th October 1764 he 
received his commission as Ensign in that corps. His promotion to the rank of 
Lieutenant followed in the year after (16th October). Two and a half years later (on 
3rd April 1768) he became Captain, getting his Majority on 29th May 1780, and his 
Lieutenant-Colonelcy on 7th December 1782. He died at Calcutta on 26th May 1793. 
From the fragmentary evidence which is still extant it appears that Colonel Kyd was 
a man of wide and varied sympathies and experience, and that, during the later years 
of his service, he attamed a position of so much influence that his suggestions on various 
_ weighty matters were not only listened to but promptly acted upon. Himself a keen 
gardener, he had brought together, round his country house at Shalimar, a collection 
of various plants of economic and horticultural interest which had been sent to him, 
partly by correspondents in the interior of the country, but which had chiefly been 
brought to him by Captains of the Company’s ships returning from their voyages to 
the Straits and to the Malayan Archipelago. Colonel Kyd conceived the idea of 
supplying the Company’s Navy with teak timber grown near the ports where it could 
be used in ship-building, and of increasing their commercial resources by introducing 
into India the cultivation of the spices which, in those days, formed so important an 
item in their trade, but for supplies of which they had to depend on their factories 
in Sumatra and Penang. ‘He communicated this idea to the Governor-General of the 
day; and, in a letter written on Ist June 1786, he officially submitted a scheme for 
the establishment of a Botanical Garden, or Garden of Acclimatization, near Calcutta. 
This scheme also included proposals for introducing, into territories subject to the 
Company, the cultivation of cotton, tobacco, coffee, tea, and various other commercial 
products, To have suggested to the local representatives of what was then practically 
a Trading Company, the provision (at a considerable annual cost) of facilities for the 
pursiit of pure, as distinguished from economic, botany would probably not have 
increased the chances of the acceptance of the Garden scheme. ‘The scientific aspect 
