582 
NATURE 
[OcToBER 12, 1899 
Smith. Rottler was the only member of the band who him- 
self published in Europe descriptions of any of the new species 
of his own collecting, and these appeared in the ‘‘ Nova Acta 
Acad. Nat. Curiosorum” of Berlin. A little later Sonnerat 
and other botanists of the French settlement at Pondicherry 
sent large collections of plants to Paris, and these were fol- 
lowed ata considerably later date by the collections of Leschen- 
hault. These French collections were described chiefly by 
Lamarck and Poiret. Hitherto botanical work in India had 
been more or less desultory, and it was not until the 
establishment in 1787 of the Botanic Garden at Calcutta 
that a recognised centre of botanical activity was estab- 
lished in British India. Robert Kyd, the founder of that 
Garden, was more of a gardener than a botanist. He was, 
however, a man of much energy and shrewdness. The East 
India Company was still in 1787 a trading company, and a 
large part of their most profitable business was derived from the 
nutmegs and other spices exported from their settlements in 
Penang, Malacca, Amboina, Sumatra, and other islands of the 
Malayan Archipelago. The Company were also in those days 
the owners of a fine fleet of sailing vessels, and the teak of which 
these ships were built had to be obtained from sources outside 
the Company’s possessions. The proposal to found a botanic 
garden near Calcutta was thus recommended to the Governor of 
the Company’s settlements in Bengal on the ground that, by its 
means, the cultivation of teak and of the Malayan spices might 
be introduced into a province near one of the Company’s chief 
Indian centres. Kyd, as a Lieutenant-Colonel of the Com- 
pany’s engineers, and as secretary to the Military Board at 
Calcutta, occupied a position of considerable influence, and his 
suggestion evidently fell on no unwilling ears; for the Govern- 
ment of Bengal, with the promptitude to accept and to act on 
good advice in scientific and semi-scientific matters which has 
characterised them from the day of Kyd until now, lost no time 
in taking steps to find a site for the proposed garden. Colonel 
Kyd’s official proposal was dated June 1, 1786, and, in a 
despatch dated August 2, the Calcutta Government recom- 
mended Kyd’s proposal to the Court of Directors in London, 
Posts were slow and infrequent in those days, and the Calcutta 
Government were impatient. They did not wait for a reply 
from Leadenhall Street, but in the following July they boldly 
secured the site recommended by Colonel Kyd. This site 
covered an area of 300 acres, and the whole of it, with the 
exception of thirty acres which were subsequently given up to 
Bishop Middleton for an English college, still continues 
under cultivation as a botanic garden. Kyd died in 1793, 
and in the same year his place as superintendent of the 
garden was taken by Dr. William Roxburgh, a young 
botanical enthusiast, and one of Koenig’s ‘‘ United Brother- 
hood.” Roxburgh had studied botany in Edinburgh, where he 
was a favourite pupil of Dr. Hope. Desirous of seeing some- 
thing of foreign countries, he made several voyages to Madras 
in ships belonging to the Honourable East India Company. In 
1776 he accepted an appointment in the Company’s medical 
establishment, and was posted to the town of Madras, where 
he very soon made the acquaintance of Koenig. Roxburgh was 
shortly after transferred to a remote district, a good deal to the 
north of Madras, then named the Northern Circars. The 
station of Samulcotta, which formed Roxburgh’s headquarters 
during his sojourn in the Circars, stands on the edge of a hilly 
region possessing a very interesting flora, and this flora he 
explored with the greatest ardour ; and, as part of the result of 
his labours, an account of some of the most interesting of its 
plants was published in London, at the East India Company’s 
expense, in three large folio volumes, under the title, ‘‘ The 
Plants of the Coast of Coromandel.” This was Roxburgh’s 
earliest publication on a large scale. The first part of this book 
appeared in 1795, and the last not until 1819, z.e. five years 
after the authors death. The increased facilities afforded to 
Roxburgh after his transfer to a comparatively well-equipped 
institution like that at Calcutta induced him at once to begin 
the preparation of descriptions of all the plants indigenous to 
British India of which he could procure specimens. And so 
diligently did he work that, when he was finally driven from 
India by ill-health in 1813, he left complete and ready for pub- 
lication the manuscripts of his ‘‘ Flora Indica” and of his 
“‘Hortus Bengalensis”’ (the latter being an enumeration of the 
plants in cultivation in the Calcutta garden). He also left 
admirable coloured drawings (mostly of natural size) of 2533 
species of plants indigenous to India. Seldom have twenty | 
NO. 1563, VOL. 60] 
years yielded so rich a botanical harvest! Dr. Roxburgh was 
thus the first botanist who attempted to draw up a systematic 
account of the plants of India, and his book, which is on the 
Linnzean system, is the basis of all subsequent works on Indian 
botany; and until the publication of Sir Joseph Hooker’s 
monumental ‘‘ Flora of British India,” it remained the only 
single book through whicha knowledge of Indian plants could be 
acquired. Roxburgh was immediately succeeded in the Calcutta 
garden by Dr. Buchanan-Hamilton, a man of many accomplish- 
ments, who had travelled from Nepal in the North to Ava and 
Mysore in the South, accumulating materials for a gazetteer of 
the Honourable Company’s possessions. Dr. Buchanan was a 
zoologist as well as a botanist. He had published a valuable 
account of Mysore, Canara and Malabar, and had collected 
materials for a work ‘on the Fishes of India, besides having 
accumulated a large herbarium, part of which may now be con- 
sulted at the University of Edinburgh. Prior to his death 
Buchanan- Hamilton had begun to write a learned commentary 
on Van Rheede’s ‘* Hortus Malabaricus.” Many of his Nepalese 
collections were described in 1825 (a few years before his own 
death) by Don in his ‘* Prodromus Flore Nepalensis.”” 
Buchanan-Hamilton remained only one year at Calcutia, and 
in 1815 he was succeeded by Nathaniel Wallich, a native of 
Copenhagen, who, prior to his appointment to the Calcutta 
garden, had been attached to the Danish settlement at Seram- 
pore, twenty miles higher up the Hooghly. Wallich remained 
superintendent of the Calcutta garden for thirty years. In 
1846 he went to England, and in 1854 he died. During his 
tenure of office in the Calcutta garden, Wallich organised col- 
lecting expeditions to the then little-known regions of Kamaon 
and Nepal (in the Himalaya), to Oudh, Rohilcund, Sylhet, 
Tenasserim, Penang, and Singapore. He undertook, in fact, a 
botanical survey of a large part of the Company’s possessions in 
India. The vast materials thus collected under his own imme- 
diate direction, and the various contributions made by others, 
were taken to London by him in 1828. With these were sub- 
sequently incorporated the collections of Russell, Klein, Heyne, 
Rottler, Buchanan-Hamilton, Roxburgh, and Wight. And by 
the help of a band of distinguished European botanists, among 
whom may be named De Candolle, Kunth, Lindley, Meissner, 
Nees von Esenbeck, Von Martius and Bentham (the latter in a 
very special manner), this vast mass of material was classified 
and named specifically. A catalogue of the collection 
was prepared by Wallich himself (largely aided by Ben- 
tham), and sets of the named specimens were dis- 
tributed to the leading botanical institutions in Europe, 
every example of each species bearing the same number. No 
description of the whole collection was ever attempted, but 
many of the plants belonging to it were subsequently described 
in various places and at various times. So extensive was the 
Wallichian distribution that, amongst the names and synonyms. 
of tropical Asiatic plants, no citation is more frequent in 
botanical books than that of the contraction ‘* Wall. Cat.” 
Besides the naming and distribution of this gigantic collection, 
Wallich prepared and published, at the expense of the same 
liberal and enlightened East India Company, his ‘‘ Plante 
Asiaticze Rariores,” in three folio volumes with 300 coloured 
plates. He also contributed to an edition of Roxburgh’s. 
“*Flora Indica,” which was begun by the celebrated Dr. Carey 
of Serampore, descriptions of many plants of his own collecting. 
But the task of publishing his discoveries in this way proved 
beyond his powers, as it would have proved beyond those of 
any one who had only 365 days to his year, and less than a 
hundred years as his term of life! Carey and Wallich’s edition 
of Roxburgh’s ‘‘ Flora Indica” was brought to an untimely 
conclusion at the end of the Pentandria Monogynia of Linneus. 
Wallich also began an illustrated account of the flora of Nepal 
under the title, ‘‘ Tentamen Flore Nepalensis.’’ But this also 
came to a premature end with the publication of its second part. 
During much of the time that Wallich was labouring in 
Northern India, Robert Wight, a botanist of remarkable sagacity 
and of boundless energy, was labouring in Southern India, 
chiefly in parts of the Peninsula different from those in which 
Koenig and his band had worked. Wight was never liberally 
supported by the Government of Madras, and it was mostly by 
his own efforts and from his own resources that his collections 
were made and that his botanical works were published. The 
chief of the latter is his ‘‘ Icones Plantarum.” This book con- 
sists of figures with descriptions of more than two thousand 
Indian species. A good many of the plates are indeed copies 
