NEW NOTES ON THE ZINQIBERACEAE 

 OF JAVA AND MALAYA. 



BY 



Dr. Th. Valeton. 



PART I. 



§ 1. In a preceding paper on the Zingiberaceae of Java ') I gave the 

 results of a study of living specimens collected by myself in some woods 

 of West Java (mt Salak, Mt Gedeh and jungle of Depok) and in the Bot. 

 Gardens of Buitenzorg. Dried materials were put practically aside; and 

 only part of the genera was dealt with. 



The following report is to contain some completions to the former 

 treatise, in the first place a survey of those genera then passed over and 

 further the result of the examination of the Buitenzorg Herbarium as to 

 the Zingiberaceae of Java (collections of Koorders and Backer), the Malayan 

 archipelago, of which the materials are still very scanty, and of the species 

 cultivated in the Bot. Garden. 



The first part is to contain the genera Curcuma, Gastrochilus, Kaemferia 

 and Zingiber. 



The genus Curcuma has been dealt with in a more ample way than 

 the other genera. 



This ampleness is a consequence of the following facts. Sometime 

 before my resignation as a curator of the Herbarium, in 1913, Mr. Heyne, 

 curator of the Museum for economical Botany, applied to me for the deter- 

 mination of the numerous kinds of Curcuma rhizomes sold in the native 

 bazars and provided me with flowering materials of a good many species. 



There existing already a rather extensive literature about this genus 

 among which the splendid pictures of Roscoe, the detailed descriptions of 

 Roxburgh and Wallich, the monograph of K. Schumann, the Flora of Indo- 

 china by Gagnepain, the Exkursionsflora of Koorders, the task seemed not a 

 very difficult one. It appeared however that the Javanese species were very 

 insufficiently known, that the majority of the cultivated species were endemic 

 or at least not to be' reduced to any of the descriptions or pictures existing 

 of asiatic species, that the keys and descriptions in Schumann's monography 



') Vide Neue und unvollständig bekannte Zingiberaceae aus West-Java, Bulletin 

 de l'institut botanique de Buitenzorg No. 20, 1904. 



