Malay Plant Names. 



The Malay language is remarkably rich in names of plants, 

 and hitherto these names have either been incorrectly determin- 

 ed or not determined at all in the few dictionaries in which one 

 might expect to find them. This is the more regrettable since 

 these names often possess a considerable amount of interest, as 

 they often occur in Malay writings and a very large number of 

 names of places are based on names of plants, such for instance 

 are Malacca, Pekan, Setul, Penang, Changi, Cape Rumenia, 

 TanjongRu, Gunong Pulai. The importance of correctly cor- 

 relating the native names of drugs, timbers and other economic 

 products with the scientific ones needs no explanation. Dic- 

 tionaries and Vocabularies, such as those of Marsden and Favre, 

 contain indeed a number of plant names, many of which are 

 derived from Pijnappel, Klinkert, and Horsfield, but a consider- 

 able proportion of these appear to be Sumatran, and Javanese. 

 Nor does Filet (Plantkundige VVoordenboek) help much, for 

 most of his Malay words are, as far as I have seen, not known 

 in the Peninsula, or if they are in use are applied to a totally 

 different plant from that which he gives. Thus the well-known 

 plant Ampalas, the leaves of which are used for polishing 

 wood, is given as signifying one or other of about ten kinds of 

 fig trees, only one of which, as far as I know, is found in the 

 Malay Peninsula, while the name is generally used here for a 

 climber Tetracera belonging to quite a different order, viz : Dil- 

 leniacece. Curiously, Filet does not appear to have made much 

 use, if any, of Rumph's Herbarium Amboinense, a work con- 

 taining a very large number of native names. Rumph gives a 

 good many Malay names for his plants, and some of these are 

 decidedly nearer those in use in the Peninsula than Filet's 



