1897.] D> Prain — Some additional Leguminogje. 393 



leaflets ovafce-lanceolate all gradually narrowing to an acute point. 

 D. japonicum Miq. Ann. Mus. Lugd.-Bat. iii. 46. D. podocarptim Wall. 

 Cat. 5711 B (in part) ; Bah. in Flor. Brit. Lid ii. 165 in part, not of DC, 

 Himalaya; Sirraur; Vicary ! N epal ; Wallich ! Sikkim ; Hooker! 

 Gammie ! Assam ; Khasia, Hooker ! Clarke ! Mann ! Naga Hills, Prain ! 

 Distrib. China, Japan. 



Stems 2-3 feet, herbaceous, terete, branches angular glabrous. Stipules small. 

 Corolla and pod as in D. podocarpum. 



It may be admitted that this is the eastern representative of D. podocarpum but 

 that it should be reduced, even as a distinct variety, to D. podocarpum the writer 

 cannot believe. The foliage is totally different and there are no intermediates. 



The confusion that has grown up round this and the two preceding species 

 illustrates well the danger of placing too great a reliance on the numbered sheets of 

 the Wallichian Herbarium. That these show a larger number of erroneous identi- 

 fications than other issued collections is not implied ; on the contrary, the 

 Herbarium was carefully distributed by one of the most accurate botanists then 

 living, with the assistance in particular families of some of the most eminent Euro- 

 pean systematists of their time. In spite of this errors were bound to creep in and 

 the trouble caused by these errors in the families that had already been dealt 

 with by Mr. De Candolle in those volumes of the Podromus published before Dr. 

 Wallich's Herbarium was issued, is so great that the writer would warn all botan- 

 ists, who wish their results to be accurate, to place no confidence in the Wallichian 

 name for a species of any of these families until he has confirmed it by com- 

 parison with the specimen so named in the Prodromus Herbarium. For Dr. Wallich 

 put no number on any of the sheets that he sent originally to Mr. De Candolle 

 and many of the identifications with species which Mr. De Candolle had described 

 were manifestly made subsequently by Dr. Wallich without referring either to 

 Mr. De Candolle's descriptions or specimens. The same remarks apply to the 

 specimens sent by Wallich to Lambert and used by D. Don in the preparation of 

 his Prodr. Flor. Nepal. Here, also, the difficulty is greater, since the keepers of 

 the national Collections unfortunately failed to secure the Wallichian bundles in 

 the Herb. Lambert., when Mr. Lambert's collection was dispersed. 



In an angry pamphlet Dr. Griffith complained, when he came to act as Dr. 

 Wallich's substitute, that the Calcutta Herbarium had been depleted by the dis- 

 tribution of the H. E. I. C. Herbarium. This was true ; still on the whole Indian 

 botanists may be said not to have grudged the rather wholesale dispersal, seeing that 

 what was their loss was the gain of the great European Herbaria. It was besides 

 always possible to begin afresh, and there has been brought together at Calcutta, 

 since his time, a collection such as probably Dr. Wallich never dreamed of. But what 

 has been in the highest degree detrimental to Indian systematic botany has been the 

 peculiar way in which Wallichian specimens, no matter how fragmentary, have been 

 converted into fetishes ; and in which Wallichian names, in cases like the present, 

 have been made to override names that, accompanied by intelligible descriptions, 

 are to be found attached to the same plants in the Prodromus Herbarium. Indian 

 botanists have never grudged the loss of the typical Wallichian specimens, but they 

 have often felt, considering how these types have been misused, that it would have 

 been a greater blessing to Indian botany, had the Wallichian Herbarium, by some 

 happy accident, totally disappeared. 



