zealous in its promotion. Dr. Horsfield followed that eminent man 

 to England in 1818 and soon after was made Keeper of the ^Museum 

 of the East India Company, which charge he held until his death 

 on July 24, 1859 in the eighty-seventh year of his age. 



In regard to Dr. Horsfield's work in Java, Sir Stamford Raf- 

 fles says in his History of Java that "For all that relates to the 

 natural history of Java, I am indebted to the communications of 

 Dr. Thomas Horsfield. Though sufficient for my purpose, it forms 

 but a scanty portion of the result of his long and diligent researches 

 on the subject." 



It is not strange that one who graduated in medicine and whose 

 graduation thesis should be a study of the action of a poisonous 

 plant should be interested in other plants of pharmacological action. 

 And so we find that upwards of sixty of the medicinal plants of 

 Java were described for the first time by Dr. Horsfield in the 

 Batavian Transactions. One of these studies which gained especial 

 notice was his work on the Upas tree in which he refuted the false- 

 hoods and fabulous traditions which had been published concerning 

 this subject. 



Sir Stamford Raffles also states that "Upwards of a thousand 

 (Javanese) plants are already contained in the herbaria of Dr. 

 Horsfield, of which a large proportion are new to the naturalist.'"' 

 This extensive collection was sent to England and later (1858) 

 presented by the East India Company to the Linnean Society of 

 London. A selection only of his botanical collections was published 

 as a monograph "Plantae Javanicae Rariores." This is a beautifully 

 illustrated work, prepared with the assistance of the botanists Robert 

 Brown and J. J. Bennett. In it 2,196 species are described, all of 

 which Horsfield had collected himself. 



Dr. Horsfield although eminent as a botanist and equally versed 

 in mineralogical knowledge, was perhaps most eminent as a 

 zoologist. The most important of his zoological publications and 

 the earliest of his independent works after his coming to England, 

 was his "Zoological Researches in Java and the Xeighbouring 

 Islands," published in 1821 and the following years. His other 

 zoological writings are chiefly the valuable illustrated catalogues of 

 mammals, birds and lepidoptera of the several zoological depart- 

 ments of the East India Company's museum, and numerous papers 

 on zoological subiects contributed to the "Linnean Transactions." 



