197 



Patchouli is well known in China, the Chinese Patchouli plant is 

 neither the Patchouli plant of commerce nor the Indian Patchouli plant, 

 but is the plant with the Patchouli odour alluded to in the Kew Bulletin 

 for 1888 as occurring in Khasia and Assam. 



This latter plant, Microtoena cymosa, Prain, has been already dealt 

 with [K.B. 1902> p. 11], and it is only necessary to repeat here that it 

 is a Chinese species which seems to have spread southward, as a 

 cultivated plant, to Manipur and the Khasia Hills in Assam and to the 

 Shan States of Burma and Siam. There is, indeed, an isolated record 

 of its having reached Java, not improbably as an importation by 

 Chinese settlers ; its cultivation there has not, however, persisted, and 

 there is no indication that it ever reached Sumatra, Borneo or the 

 Malay Peninsula. 



It was pointed out [K.B. 1888, p. 74] that if this plant has the 

 true odour it may have a commercial use in India. We know now 

 that it possesses the distinctive odour in as marked a degree as the 

 Patchouli plant of commerce itself. We know besides that though it 

 is not now used commercially in India there was a time when this 

 was the source of the Patchapat sold in the Calcutta market, in 

 contradistinction to the market of Bombay, where at one time the 

 Patchapat offered for sale was derived from a cultivated state of 

 Pogostemon Heyneanus. In both markets, however, the Patchapat — 

 Patchouli leaf — formerly sold has now been almost if not quite 

 replaced by the leaf of the Patchouli plant of commerce, imported from 

 the Straits Settlements. The cultivation of Microtoena cymosa lingers 

 still in native gardens in the Khasia Hills, where its product is locally 

 used ; and that of Pogostemon Heyneanus is similarly continued in native 

 gardens throughout the Indian Peninsula from the Concan and Berar 

 southward to Coimbatore. 



This latter possibility was fully anticipated in the earliest notice 

 of Patchouli in this Bulletin [K.B. 1888, p. 74] . The scented culti- 

 vated form in question differs from the feral states of the plant, men- 

 tioned in the same place as being of common occurrence in the Western 

 Peninsula of India from Bombay southward, chiefly in having leaves 

 that are of a slightly thicker consistence. These feral states, of which 

 there are two, both extending to Ceylon, are not clearly indigenous in 

 any part of India. One form, much more frequently met with than 

 the other, was described by Bentham in 1830 as Pogostemon 

 Heyneanus— he had used the name for the first time [Wall. Cat. Lith. 

 1532] two years previously. The other form was later distinguished 

 by Bentham as P. Heyneanus, var. B. 



The more plentiful of the two forms is not, however, confined to 

 India and Ceylon. It is not uncommon in Java, Sumatra, and Borneo ; 

 in the Malay Peninsula it has been collected in almost every province. 

 So far it does not seem to have been recorded from any Malay locality 

 to the east of Borneo, but what may be another form of the speciesa 

 occurs in the Southern Shan states of Burma, side by side with the 

 Chinese Microtoena cymosa, and the commoner Indian and Malayan 

 form has more recently been found in the Philippine island of 

 Mindanao, though as yet nowhere else in that group. When the nature 



