TRANSACTIONS OF SECTION K. 907 
Mysore in the South, accumulating materials for a Gazetteer of the Honourable 
Company’s possessions. Dr. Buchanan wasa 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 consulted 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 de- 
seribed in 1825 (a few years before his own death) by Don in bis ‘ Prodromus Flore 
Nepalensis.’ Buchanan-Hamilton remained only one year at Calcutta, and in 
1815 he was succeeded by Nathaniel Wallich, a native of Copenhagen, who, prior 
to bis appointment to the Calcutta Garden, had been attached as surgeon to the 
Danish settlement at Serampore, 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 collecting expeditions to the then little-known regions of 
Kamaon and Nepal (in the Himalaya), to Oudh, Rohilcund, Sylhet, Tenasserim, 
Penang, and Singapore. He personally 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 immediate direction, and the various contributions made by others, 
were taken to London by him in 1828. With these were subsequently incorporated 
the collections of Russell, Klein, Heyne, Rottler, Buchanan-Hamilton, and Rox- 
burgh. 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 Bentham), and sets of the 
named specimens were distributed 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 hooks than that of 
tle 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 Asiaticee 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 366 days to his year, and less than a 
hundred years as his term of lite! Carey and Wallich’s edition of Roxburgh’s 
‘Flora Indica’ was brought to an untimely conclusion at the end of the Pentan- 
dria Monogynia of Linneus. Wallich also began an illustrated account of the 
Flora of Nepal under the title ‘Tentamen Florz Nepalensis.’ But this also came 
to a premature end with the publication of its second part. 
During much ofthe 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 pub- 
lished. The chief of the latter is his ‘Icones Plantarum.’ This book consists of 
figures with descriptions of more than two thousand Indian species. A good 
many of the plates are indeed copies from the suite of drawings already referred to 
as having been made at Calcutta by Dr. Roxburgh. The rest are from drawings 
made by native artists under his personal supervision. 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 Icones which he published and described were 
