THE EARLY HISTORY OF INDIAN BOTANY. 459 
specifically. A catalogue of the collection was prepared by Wallich 
himself (largely aided by Bentham), and sets of the named s speci- 
mens were distributed to the leading botanical institutions in 
a pl 
Wallichian distribution that, amongst the names and synonyms 
of tropical Asiatic plants, no citation is more frequent in botanical 
books than that of the contraction ‘Wall. Cat.” Besides the 
naming and distribution of this gigantie collection, Wallich pre- 
pared and published, at the expense of the same liberal and 
enlightened East India Company, his Plante Asiatice Rariores, 
and sixty-five days to his year, and les undred years as 
his term of life! Carey and Wallich’s edition of Rosbu urgh’s Flora 
Pentandria Monogynia of Linneus. Wallich also began an illustrated 
account of the Flora of Nepal under the title TVentamen Flore 
Nepalensis. But this also came to a premature end with the publi- 
04) oe of its second pa 
ring much of the time that Wallich was labouring in Northern 
festia;, Robert Wight, a botanist of remarkable sagacity and of bound- 
less energy, was labouring in Southern India, chiefly i 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 published. 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 
a 
made at Calcutta by Dr. Roxburgh. e rest are from drawings 
made, either by native artists under his personal supervision, or by 
his own 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 es 
the two thousand Jcones which he published and described were iss 
during the short period of thirteen years, and that during the meter 
of this time he performed his official duties as a medical officer. 
Besides this magnum opus, Wight published his Spictlegium Neil- 
gherrense in two volumes quarto, with two hundred coloured plates. 
And “maa 1840 and wie he issued in two volumes quarto, = 
two hun plates, another book named Illustrations of Ind 
Botany, the, shooct of whieh was to give figures and fuller pA st 
