906 REPORT—1899. 
established in British India. Robert Kyd, the founder of that Garden, was more of 
a gardener thana Botanist. He was, however, a man of much energy and shrewd- 
ness. 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 obtaimed 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 Company’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 Government 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 sub- 
sequently 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 Brotherhood.’ Roxburgh had . 
studied Botany in Edinburgh, where he was a favourite pupil of Dr. Hope. Desirous 
of seeing something 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 ahilly 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 Hast 
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, 
ze. five years after the author’s 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 publication 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 2,533 species of plants indigenous to India. 
Seldom have twenty years yielded so rich a Botanical harvest! Dr. Roxburgh was 
thus the first Botanist who attempted to draw upa systematic account of the 
plants of India, and his book, which is on the Linnean 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 which a knowledge of Indian plants could be acquired. Roxburgh was 
immediately succeeded in the Calcutta Garden by Dr. Buchanan-Hamilton, a man 
of many accomplishments, who had travelled from Nepal in the North to Ava and 
