312 
already adverted to, in which that term was frequently used in 
earlier times. Ventenat’s ‘A. Schoenanthus’ has, of course, nothing 
to do with the classic “ Schoenanthus.” Itis what was subsequently 
issued by Sieber from the same island as A. aromaticum and 
described as A. pruinosus, Nees, by Steudel,* a form very closely 
allied to Cymbopogon polyneuros (Andropogon versicolor) of the 
Nilgiris and Ceylon. 
The vagueness of Linnaeus’s diagnosis and the absence or 
extreme rarity of herbarium specimens at that time on the one ~ 
hand, and on the other the precision of Ventenat’s description and 
figure, explain sufficiently why henceforth his ‘A. Schoenanthus’ 
was very generally taken as the type of that species, although it 
remained assigned to Linnaeus as the author. The identity of 
Linnaeus’s original ‘A. Schoenanthus’ was, however, further 
obscured by the circumstance that in the very year (1800) in 
which Ventenat published his plate of a Mauritius grass under 
the name of ‘A. Schoenanthus,’ Desfontainest described the old 
‘ Schoenanthus, which he had collected in Tunis in 1783 or 1784, 
as a new species, viz.: A. lanigerum (sic). Desfontaines, who 
in 1800 would know the A. Schoenanthus of his friend 
Cels if he did not already then grow the grass himself in the 
Jardin des Plantes—he did so in 1804{—must of course, have 
considered himself quite justified in doing as he did. ‘The 
confusion has not entirely escaped the attention of botanists, as 
for instance of Nees and Steudel, but it soon became so great 
that their efforts have resulted in merely further complicating 
the nomenclature. 
OIL OF CYMBOPOGON SCHOENANTHUS.—I have already pointed 
out the use, which was made of ‘ Schoenanthus’ in ancient Greece © 
and Rome and also in the Orient, for aromatizing oils. The 
same use is recorded by the author of the ‘ Tuhfat-el-muminin ’ 
(1669 A.D.), but he also mentions, according to the ‘ Pharmaco- 
graphia Indica’ (vol. ili. p. 558), “a distilled water prepared from 
Izkhir.” It is, however, not quite ciear which ‘ /zkhir’ is meant. 
On the other hand Kaempfer$, who travelled in Persia from 
1683-1688, speaks distinctly of the distillation of oil from Persian 
- and Arabian ‘ Schoenanthus,’ but whether he refers to it only as a 
casual experiment or as an industry is not said. If the latter, it 
cannot have been on more than a very moderate scale, such as 
we find in existence in the Panjab. Edgeworth,| who is the first 
to mention the grass (under A. Aviani) from North-Western India, 
made the following note on a label accompanying a specimen 
collected by him near Firuzpur in 1840; and now in the 
Wallichian collection of the Linnean Society: “An essential oil 
expressed from the roots, manufactured only at Kasur in the 
Punjab.” Thisis probably the same kind of oil which Vigne — 
records from Hassan Abdal (between Attok and Rawulpindi) with 
these words: “A stimulating oil is extracted and used in 
medicine.’ Mr. Drummond assures me that a family of priests at 
* Steudel, Syn. Pl. Glum. vol. i. (1855), p. 388. 
+ Desfontaines, F1. Atl., vol. ii. (1800), p. 379. 
+ Desfontaines, Tabl. Ecole Bot. (1804), p. 14. 
§ Kaempfer, Amoen. Exot. (1712), p. 772. 
|| Edgeworth in Journ. Linn, Soc., vol, vi. (1862), p. 208, 
