INTRODUCTION 



37 



searching the literature from 1753 to 1866 for references to the 

 Herbarium Amboinense must have entailed many months of 

 exacting labor. Where numerous synonyms are cited, or at least 

 numerous names are listed, to which a Rumphian species has 

 been reduced, usually no opinion is expressed as to which is the 

 correct one. Many of those suggested by Hasskarl himself are 

 palpably wrong, due perhaps to his lack of knowledge of the 

 Malayan flora. It is not evident that Hasskarl ever had a very 

 wide knowledge of the flora of the Malay Archipelago in spite 

 of his residence in Java and his published botanical contributions. 

 Many of his errors of interpretation were primarily due to the 

 same factor that caused others to fail in properly interpreting 

 Rumphius's species; that is, a lack of botanical material from 

 Amboina and the neighboring islands. On account of the method 

 of arranging his data, Hasskarl's work is difficult to consult, 

 is entirely unsatisfactory in aiding the botanist to gain a definite 

 idea of which species are actually included in Rumphius's work 

 and which are not, and because of the numerous errors in reduc- 

 tions is, it is feared, more or less discredited among botanists 

 familiar with the Malayan flora. 



Hasskarl's work performed one distinct service that his pre- 

 decessors failed in. Stickman, Linnaeus, Burman, and Henschel 

 dealt only or largely with the species figured by Rumphius, 

 ignoring the descriptions to a large extent; Hasskarl, however, 

 brought out clearly the fact that Rumphius described very many 

 more forms than he figured. He perhaps went to extremes in 

 enumerating all the variants of such plants as the coconut palm, 

 sugar cane, rice, banana, and other cultivated forms, and cer- 

 tainly went to extremes in attempting to reduce the Rumphian 

 descriptions of these variants to named forms and varieties 

 under the binomial system. Several binomials were proposed 

 by Hasskarl, typified by citation of Rumphius's descriptions and 

 figures, in attempting to account for Rumphius's species. These 

 were overlooked in compiling Index Kewensis, but invariably 

 fall as synonyms. 



In consulting Hasskarl's work, it should be noted that the 

 numerous citations of Loureiro, Flora Cochinchinensis, are of 

 the second, or Willdenow's, edition, 1793; that the references 

 to Linnaeus are not to the original works of this author, but to 

 Richter's Codex Botanicus Linneanus (1840) ; while Stickman's 

 1754 dissertation on the Herbarium Amboinense, and usually also 

 the 1759 reprint, is not cited. 



