APPENDIX IV. 



HISTORY OF CEYLON BOTANY. 



By G. S. Boulger, F.L.S., F.G.S., Professor of Botany, City of 

 London College. 



The first serious student of the botany of Ceylon was Paul 

 Hermann, born at Halle, in Saxony, June 30th, 1646.* It is 

 related of him that, when a boy of ten, he fell into the water when 

 he was collecting plants and was nearly drowned. He was 

 educated at Wittenberg, Leipsic, and Jena, but graduated in 

 medicine in Padua, in 1670. Through the good offices of Arnold 

 Syen, Professor of Medicine and Botany at Leyden, and annotator 

 of the first volume of Rheede's ' Hortus Malabaricus,' he was 

 introduced to the Governor of the Dutch East India Company, 

 by whom he was appointed ' Ordinary and First Physician ' in 

 Ceylon, where he resided from 1672 to 1679. On his voyage out 

 he botanised at the Cape of Good Hope, making large collections, 

 some results of which were embodied in a catalogue published by 

 J. Burmann in his 'Thesaurus Zeylanicus' (1647). * 



At this period the Dutch held most of the coast towns of 

 Ceylon, having wrested Colombo from the Portuguese only so 

 recently as 1655; but the whole interior still remained under the 

 rule of the native Emperor of Kandy, at this time the powerful 

 Raja Singha, and it is interesting to note that our countryman^. 

 Robert Knox,f was undergoing his long captivity in the interior at 

 the very period of Hermann's sojourn at Colombo.^ Dr. Trimen 

 infers from Hermann's chief herbarium, which is, he says, 'a 

 representative one of the environs of Colombo, that Hermann 

 neither travelled far from the coast nor had the opportunity of 

 penetrating into any tract of untouched forest.' In addition to an 

 herbarium sent to Commelin, Hermann sent specimens from Ceylon 

 to other botanists ; but certainly not, as Dr. Trimen imagines {op, 

 at., pp. 132, 134), to Gronovius, since that botanist was not born 

 until 1690, and was, therefore, only five years old at Hermann's 

 death. Hermann's plants in the Banksian herbarium received from 

 Gronovius must, therefore, have come to the latter indirectly. 

 Hermann's own herbarium of plants, collected either wild or 

 growing in the gardens of the natives, was pasted into three 



* Not 1640, as stated in Pritzel's. f Vide infra, p. 372. 



X ' Journ. Linn. Soc. ' (Bot. ), xxiv. p. 131. 



