48 JOURNAL, BOMBAY NATURAL HISTORY SOCIETY, Vol IX. 



Let me now proceed to notice a few points worthy of special 

 remarks in the writings of European botanists who have studied the 

 plant under notice. Wight, in his Icones Plantarum Ind. Orient, 

 (vol. Ill), gives two plates, numbered 782 and 785. The former illus- 

 trates a gigantic flower- stalk with its enclosing spathe, and the latter 

 depicts the tuber, leaf, and flower-stalk. He says that he depicts the 

 gigantic flower-stalk, as he finds no reference to a flower of such 

 size in Roxburgh's work. Botanists have to be thankful to Wight for 

 this illustration, as it serves to persons like myself of a younger 

 generation to emphasize what he observed in his days, by adding my 

 own humble testimony that his picture illustrates but a gigantic, 

 well-developed inflorescence of one and the same species as given in 

 his plate No. 785. This I have been able to observe for a number 

 of years in the flower-stalks thrown out by large tubers weighing 

 30 to 40 lbs. The larger the tuber, the more gigantic the flower. By 

 some unfortunate mistake, however (evidently that of the printer's devil), 

 Wight's descriptions of his plates 782 and 785 are transposed in the 

 letter-press given at the beginning of the third volume of his Icones, 

 which at first sight is confusing to one who has not had the opportunity 

 of watching the growth of gigantic flower-stalks from very large-sized 

 tubers. The result is that even a learned and veteran botanist like 

 Sir Joseph Hooker, in quoting Wight in his " Flora of British India" 

 (vide page 513, part XIX), is obliged to put a query against Wight's 

 plate 782.* From my own observation, however, I am able to say — 

 and I say it with profound respect for Sir Joseph Hooker — that Wight's 

 plate No. 782 represents an exceptionally large flower-stalk, obtained 

 under cultivation of a large tuber of the very same plant depicted 

 by Wight in his plate No. 785 of the same work. If hereby I am 

 able to satisfy Sir Joseph Hooker, I shall have done some service 

 to Dr. Wight, however humble, in having tried to remove a 

 doubt as regards the accuracy of his observations — a doubt which, 

 I admit, must necessarily arise in the minds of careful investi- 

 gators of the stamp of Sir Joseph Hooker wholly and solely from the 

 unfortunate transposition of Dr. Wight's description of his plates. 



* I address the remarks to Sir Joseph Hooker, although I know from his note at 

 p. 490, part XIX of his Flora of British India that the Descriptions of the Indian 

 Species of the Aroid Family are drawn up for his work by Mr. N. E. Brown. 



