INTRODUCTION 



13 



general region from which Rumphius secured his material. In 

 spite of what has been accomplished in the past hundred years on 

 the Moluccan flora and the intensive field work prosecuted in Am- 

 boina for four and one-half months by Doctor Robinson, num- 

 erous species typified by Rumphius's descriptions and figures 

 are still of doubtful status and must so remain, until in each 

 case they are definitely connected with botanical material orig- 

 inating in the classical locality for each species and agreeing 

 with the descriptions and figures, the native names, the economic 

 uses, and the other characters indicated by Rumphius. 



The work already prosecuted in Amboina and the neighboring 

 islands has yielded material by which the essential characters 

 of very many of the Rumphian species can be definitely deter- 

 mined, but much remains to be done in this field. In botanical 

 literature there are scores of species whose only published de- 

 scriptions are the brief general statements compiled from the 

 Herbarium Amboinense, from which data alone it is usually im- 

 possible for the working systematist to gain any definite idea 

 of the true characters of the species. This is especially true 

 in such critical genera as Calamus, Elaeocarpus, Citrus, Bambusa, 

 Canarium, and in many others. Botanists generally have been 

 content to work on the Malayan flora, describing as new the 

 various forms that have appeared in current collections, without 

 making any serious attempt to determine the exact status of 

 species in the same groups based on Rumphian descriptions. 

 Stability in nomenclature demands that the status of these early 

 species be determined as soon as possible, for otherwise many 

 reductions must be eventually made. 



The Herbarium Amboinense was very extensively cited by Lin- 

 naeus's contemporaries and successors, especially by Burman f., 

 Loureiro, and others, who wrote on the floras of regions geo- 

 graphically allied to Amboina, and by all authors of general 

 works on systematic botany up to the middle of the nineteenth 

 century. In the more recent works on systematic botany the 

 Herbarium Amboinense is not so frequently quoted as in older 

 ones, references to this work being to a large degree those 

 necessary to explain synonymy. However, binomials based 

 wholly on the Rumphian descriptions and figures continue to be 

 proposed, the latest ones observed being Sindora galedupa Prain, 

 1897, and Calamus acidus Beccari, 1906. 



It is by no means certain that the importance of the Her- 

 barium Amboinense is fully appreciated. The number and the 

 size of the volumes, seven, folio; the number of printed pages, 



