ANNIVERSARY ADDRESS OF THE PRESIDENT. XXXIX 



meer. By these means he amassed a rich and valuable herba- 

 rium ; but his natural bent was most strongly exhibited in the in- 

 vestigation of the properties of plants and their application to the 

 wants of men ; and for a considerable time he supplied the hospitals 

 of Bengal with indigenous drugs, as substitutes for the expensive 

 articles imported from Europe. He devoted himself with great 

 success to the identification of the articles in the bazaars of the 

 East with the medicines familiar to the Greeks, as described by 

 Dioscorides and Theophrastus. He investigated the agricultural 

 resources of the plains of India, with a view to the improved cul- 

 ture and introduction of various grains and of plants yielding fibres 

 and other useful products ; and he endeavoured to direct attention to 

 the capabilities of the valleys and slopes of the Himalaya for the 

 growth of tea, which has since been so successfully carried out. 

 Dr. Boyle's principal work, " The Illustrations of the Botany of the 

 Himalaya Mountains," is a storehouse of valuable facts and infor- 

 mation, bearing on these and other allied subjects. 



The favourable situation of Saharunpore provided other tempting 

 fields of natural investigation, which his ardent zeal would not per- 

 mit him to neglect. Single-handed he undertook the, for a tropical 

 climate, severe task of taking hourly observations of the thermometer 

 and hygrometer, and of the barometer on a single day in each month 

 throughout the year, besides the regular ordinary observations twice 

 a day ; and by these means obtained excellent data for determining 

 the meteorological conditions of the climate, and fixing one of the 

 standard stations by which the range of mean temperature over the 

 continent of India has been ascertained. He made collections of the 

 mammalia, birds, reptiles, and insects of the northern plains and 

 mountains of India, in themselves so valuable and extensive, that 

 they furnished materials for two important and distinct memoirs by 

 eminent British naturalists, upon the fauna of India, contained in 

 " The Illustrations." During the various journeys through the 

 Himalaya mountains, he carefully collected specimens of all the 

 rocks he met with, marked the direction, and measured the inclina- 

 tion of the strata, — ascertained the elevation of the successive ridges, 

 and the depressions of the intervening valleys, by barometrical mea- 

 surement, and recorded the whole of the observations with such 

 care, that, gleaning materials from other sources, and aided by Sir 

 Henry Delabeche, he was enabled to produce a very respectable 

 approximative geological section across the chain of the Himalayas, 

 from the plains of Hindostan to the Snowy Range, which was 

 brought out in his * Illustrations.' All these varied and extensive 

 researches were condensed within the comparatively short period 

 of eight years. Gifted by nature with a strong frame, and a healthy 

 constitution that never failed him, and which sickness never touched, 

 he toiled from first to last as an earnest and ardent investigator of 

 every natural object which came before him. 



India has not always escaped that political reaction which hurries 

 men in authority from reckless expenditure into sordid parsimony. 

 It was thus that the first Burmese and other wars had thrown the 



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