OcToBER 12, 1899 | 
NATURE 
583 
from the suite of drawings already referred to as having been 
made at Calcutta by Dr. Roxburgh. The rest are from 
drawings made, either by native artists under his personal 
supervision, or by his own kands. Ample evidence of the 
extraordinary energy of Dr. Wight is afforded by the facts that, 
although he had to teach the native artists whom he employed 
both to draw and to lithograph, the two thousand Zcones which 
he published and described were issued during the short period 
of thirteen years, and that during the whole of this time he 
performed his official duties as a medical officer. 
Besides this magnum opus, Wight published his Spicelegdane 
Nilghirense in two vols. quarto, with 200 coloured plates. And 
between 1840 and 1850 he issued in two vols. quarto, with 200 
plates, another book named ‘‘ Illustrations of Indian Botany,” 
the object of which was to give figures and fuller descriptions 
of some of the chief species described in a systematic book of 
the highest botanical merit, which he prepared conjointly with 
Dr. J. Walker-Arnot, Professor of Botany in the University of 
Glasgow, and which was published under the title ‘* Prodromus 
Flore Peninsule Indice.” The ‘‘Prodromus” was the 
first attempt at a flora of any part of India in which the natural 
system of classification was followed. Owing chiefly to the 
death of Dr. Walker-Arnot, this work was never completed, 
and this splendid fragment of a flora of Peninsular India ends 
with the natural order Défsaceae. ; 
The next great Indian botanist whose labours demand our 
attention is William Griffith. Born in 1810, sixteen years after 
Wight, and twenty-four years later than Wallich, Griffith died 
before either. But the labours even of such devotees to science as 
were these two are quite eclipsed by those of this most remarkable 
man. Griffith’s botanical career in India was begun in Tenas- 
serim. From thence he made botanical expeditions to the Assam 
valley, exploring the Mishmi, Khasia and Naga ranges. From 
the latter he passed by a route never since traversed by a 
botanist, through the Hookung valley down the Irrawadi to 
Rangoon. Having been appointed, soon after his arrival in 
Rangoon, surgeon to the Embassy to Bhotan, he explored part 
of that country and also part of the neighbouring one of Sikkim. 
At the conclusion of this exploration he was transferred to the 
opposite extremity of the Northern frontier, and was posted to 
the Army of the Indus. After the subjugation of Cabul, he 
penetrated to Khorassan. Subsequently he visited the portion 
of the Himalaya of which Simla is now the best-known spot. 
He then made arun down the Nerbudda valley in Central India, 
and finally appearedin Malacca as Civil Surgeon of that Settle- 
ment. At the latter place he soon died of an abscess of the 
liver brought on by the hardships he had undergone on his various 
travels, which were made under conditions most inimical to 
health, in countries then absolutely unvisited by Europeans. No 
botanist ever made such extensive explorations, nor himself 
collected so many species (9000) as Griffith did during the brief 
thirteen years of his Indian career; none ever made so many 
field notes or wrote so many descriptions of plants from living 
specimens. His botanical predecessors and contemporaries 
were men of ability and devotion. Griffith was a man of 
genius. He did not confine himself to the study of flowering 
plants, nor to the study of them from the point of view of their 
place in any system of classification. He also studied their 
morphology. The difficult problems in the latter naturally had 
most attraction for him, and we find him publishing, in the 
Linnaean Transactions, the results of his researches on the 
ovule’ in Santalum, Loranthus, Viscum, and Cycas. Griffith 
was also a cryptogamist. He collected, studied, and wrote 
much on Mosses, Liverworts, JZarsz/zaceae, and Lycopods, and 
he made hundreds of drawings to illustrate his microscopic 
observations. Wherever he travelled he made sketches of the 
most striking features in the scenery. THis habit of making 
notes was inveterate ; and his itinerary diaries are full of in- 
formation, not only on the botany, but also on the zoology, 
physical geography, geology, meteorology, archeology |and 
agriculture of the countries through which he passed. His 
manuscripts and drawings, although left in rather a chaotic 
state, were published after his death under the editorship of 
Dr. McClelland, at the expense of the enlightened and ever- 
liberal East India Company. They occupy six volumes in 
octavo, four in quarto, and one (a “‘ Monograph of Palms”’) 
in folio. 
Another botanist of much fame, who died prematurely in 
1822, after an Indian career of only nine years, was William 
Jack. In 1814-15, Jack accompanied Ochterlony’s army to the 
NO. 1563, VOL. 60] 
Nepal terai. He was transferred in 1818 to the Company’s 
settlement in Sumatra under Sir Stamford Raffles, and during the 
four years of his residence in Sumatra he contributed to botanical 
literature descriptions of many new genera and species which were 
published in his ‘‘ Malayan Miscellanies.” His collections, un- 
fortunately, were for the most part lost by an accident, but those 
which were saved are now in the Herbarium Delessert in 
Geneva. 
Somewhat similar to Griffith in temperament and versatility 
was the brilliant Victor Jacquemont, a French botanist who, at 
the instance of the Paris Natural History Museum, travelled in 
India for three years from 1829 to 1832. During this period 
Jacquemont collected largely in the Gangetic plain. He then 
entered the North-west Himalaya at Mussourie, explored Ghar- 
wal and Sirmur, ascended the Sutlej to Kanawer and Piti (at 
that time unexplored), visited Cashmir, and returning to the 
plains, crossed Northern Rajputana to Malwa and the Deccan. 
He finally reached Bombay with the intention of returning to 
France. But at Bombay he succumbed to disease of the liver, 
brought on by hard work and exposure. His remains, after 
having lain in the cemetery there for fifty years, were, with that 
tender regard for the personality of her famous sons which 
France has always shown, exhumed in 1881, and conveyed in a 
French frigate to finda permanent resting-place in the place 
of Jacquemont’s birth. Jacquemont’s collections were trans- 
mitted to Paris, and his plants were described by Cambessedes 
and Decaisne, while his non-botanical collections were elaborated 
by workers in the branches of science to which they respectively 
appertained, the whole being published in four volumes quarto, 
at the expense of the French Government. 
The roll of eminent botanists who worked in India during 
the first half of the century closes with the name of Thomas 
Thomson, who collected plants extensively between 1842 and 
1847 in Rohilkund and the Punjab, and again still more ex- 
tensively during a Government mission to the North-west 
Himalaya and Tibet which was continued from 1847 to 1849. 
During this period Dr. Thomson explored Simla, Kanawar, 
Piti, Cashmir, Ladak, and part of the Karakoram. His col- 
lections, which were large and important, were transmitted to 
the Botanic Garden at Calcutta, and thence in part to Kew. 
They formed no insignificant part of the materials en which 
the “‘ Flora Indica” and ‘‘ Flora of British India” were founded. 
Dr. Thomson also published an account of his travels—an 
admirable book, though now jostled out of memory by the 
quantities of subsequently issued books of Himalayan travel and 
adventure. 
About the year 1820 a second centre of botanical enterprise 
was established at Seharunpore, in the North-west Provinces. 
A large old garden near that important town, which had been 
originally founded by some Mahommedan nobles of the Delhi 
Court, was taken over by the Honourable Company, and was 
gradually put upon a scientific basis by Dr. George Govan, who 
was appointed its first superintendent. Dr. Govan was in 1823 
succeeded by Dr. J. Forbes Royle, and he in 1832 by Dr. 
Hugh Falconer. Dr. Royle made collections in the Jumno- 
Gangetic plain, in the Lower Gharwal Himalaya, and in 
Cashmir. He was distinguished in the field of economic rather 
than in that of systematic botany, his chief contribution to the 
latter having been a folio volume entitled ‘‘ Illustrations of the 
Botany of the Himalaya Mountains.” His valuable labours as 
an economic botanist will be noticed later on. Hugh Falconer 
Was an accomplished paleontologist who devoted but little of 
his splendid talents to botany. His great contribution to 
palzontology, the value of which it is almost impossible to 
over-estimate, consisted of his exploration and classification of 
the tertiary fossils of the Sewalik range. Falconer was trans- 
ferred to the Calcutta Garden in 1842. He was succeeded at 
Seharunpore by Dr. W. Jameson, who explored the botany of 
Gharwal, Kamaon and Cashmir, but who published nothing 
botanical, his chief energies having been devoted to the useful 
work of introducing the cultivation of the China tea plant 
into British India, and this he did (as will afterwards be 
mentioned) with triumphant success. 
During the first half of the century a considerable amount of 
excellent botanic work was done in Western India by Graham, 
Law, Nimmo, Gibson, Stocks and Dalzell, the results of whose 
labours culminated in the preparation by Graham of a list 
of the plants of Bombay, which was not, however, published 
until 1839 (after his death); in the publication by Stocks 
of various papers on the botany of Scinde; and in the publi- 
