458 THE EARLY HISTORY OF INDIAN BOTANY. 
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 Mlora 
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 two thousand 
five hundred and thirty-three 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 up a 
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 monu- 
south, accumulating materials for a Gazetteer of the Honourable 
Company’s possessions. Dr. Buchanan was a zoologist as well as 
a botanist. He had published a valuable account of Mysore, 
anara, 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 described in 1825 (a few years before his 
kn 
Rohilkund, Sylhet, Tenasserim, Penang, and Singapore. He under- 
subsequently incorporated the collections of Russell, Klein, Heyne, 
Rottler, Buchanan-Hamilton, Roxburgh, and Wight; and by the 
Lape eee 
