NATURAL PRODUCTIONS OF THE EAST INDIES. 69 



VIII. 



Letters from Dr. William Roxburgh, of Calcutta, to Dr, 

 C. Taylor, Secretary to the Society/ of Arts, ^c, on ««» 

 rious Natural Productions of the East Indies*. 



My dear Sir, 



JLT will give you pleasure to learn, that T and my family 

 arrived at Bengal in very good health. I have not had 

 much time to prepare any kind of commjinication for the 

 Society, but shall not be idle. I trust that I shall by early 

 conveyance receive your letter from Dr. Hunter, the Se- 

 cretary of our Asiatic Society, to accompany the copy of 

 the Transactions of the Society of Arts, Tell me what is Extract of ^'aute 

 thought of the extract of the gaub, or tannin, I sent you or tannin, 

 prepared from the fruit of diospyros glutinosus, or rather 

 embryopter'rs e;\iit\mf era, Coromandel Plajits, Vol. I, No. '^O; 

 you know you were only just put into a way of getting it^ 

 from the India house, when I left you, 



I propose to get Mr. Cowper, the surgeon of the ship we pj^j^gg ^f ^ 

 came out in, to carry this, and a sample of the fibres of No. shrubby spe. 

 3 of my last communication, on the Comparative Strength "esof nettle^ 

 &c. of the Plant called Calooee by the Malays, see Vol.24, 

 page 148t. I can cultivate this plant to any extent, as it 

 grows readily from slips and cuttings, is perennial, and yields 

 three or four cuttings, or crops, annually ; but the cleaning 

 of the fibres from the glutinous fieshy exterior coat, with 

 which they are covered and intermixed, is uncommonly dif- 

 ficult. It has been simply scraped off in the sample T now 

 send you, which I think you may present to the Society, 

 though I fear tlsis letter js written in too great a hurry for 

 their attention. 1 beg of you to try to procure me all the 

 information you can relative to cleaning such fibres. When 

 the shoots are cut, the bark peels ofl' most readily, but no 



* Trans, of the Society of Arts, vols. XXVI an<} XXVII. 



t See Journal, vol. XVI, p. 226, 238, 



kind 



