INTRODUCTION. Iv 



foreign medicinal plants, especially of America, were brought to 

 and naturalized in India by the Portuguese, Dutch, and other 

 maritime nations. Agave Americana, Ananasa sativa, Anona 

 squamosa, and several other native plants of America are now to 

 be met with throughout the peninsula of Hindustan. Von Rheede 

 tried to gather all the informations about the medicinal uses of 

 the plants of this country in his Rovtus Malabarica, which should 

 be looked upon as the first systematic work by a European, giv- 

 ing the medicinal uses of the plants of India. But little attention 

 was paid to the medicinal plants of this country till the founda- 

 tion of the Asiatic Society of Bengal. The Society was estab- 

 lished mainly through the exertions of Sir Willam Jones, who 

 was its first president. He was as great a botanist as a classical 

 scholar. He looked upon the Society as corresponding in its 

 aims and objects to the Royal Society of England. The Asiatic 

 Society has fulfilled the expectations of its gifted founder. Sir 

 William Jones himself pointed out the importance and necessity 

 of studying the Indian medicinal plants. In a paper on the 

 design of a treatise on the plants of India, read by him before 

 the Bengal Asiatic Society, he said that " Some hundreds of 

 plants which are yet imperfectly known to European botanists 

 and with the virtues of which they are wholly unacquainted, 

 grow wild on the plains and in the forests of India. The 

 Amarakosha^ an excellent vocabulary of the Sanskrit language, 

 contains in one chapter the names of about 300 medicinal 

 vegetables ; the Medini may comprise many more ; and the 

 Dravy&bhidhana or Dictionary of natural productions includes, 

 I believe, a far greater number, the properties of which are 

 distinctly related in medical tracts of approved authority."* 



The example set by Sir William Jones was not lost upon his 

 successors. Roxburgh, the Linnaeus of Indian Botany, collected 

 all the informations about the medicinal plants of this country 

 in his Flora Indica. Professor Lindley in his work on Flora 

 Medica is indebted for his information regarding the medicinal 

 plants of India to Roxburgh's magnum opus. Roxburgh's 

 Flora Indica was an authority on the medicinal plants of this 



* Sir Wm. Jones' Works, London, 1799, vol. II, p. 2. 



