April 2, 1990.1 THE TEOPICAL AGRICULTURIST. 
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Mysore in the South, accnmnlating materials for a 
Gazetteer of the Honourable Company's possessions. 
Dr. Buchanan was a Zoologist as well as a Botanist. 
He had published a valuable account of iviysore, 
Canara, and Malabar, and had collected materials 
for a work on the Fishes of India, besides having 
accumulated a large Herbarium, part of which may 
row be consulted at the University of Edinburgh. 
Prior to his death Buchanan-Hamilton had begun to 
write a learned commentary on Van Kheede s ' Hortua 
Malabaricus.' Many of his Nepalese collections were 
described in 1825 (a few years before his own death) 
by Don in his Trodromus FlorjE Nepalensis.' Buch- 
anan-Hamilton reinaintd only one year at Calcutta, 
and in 1815 he was succeeded by Nathaniel Wallich, 
a native of Copenhagen, who, prior to his appoint- 
ment to the Calcutia Garden, had been attached as 
Burgeon to the Danish settlement at Serampore, twenty 
miles higher up the Hooghlv. Wallich remained 
Superintendent of the Calcutta Garden for thirty 
years. In 1846 he went to England, and in 1854 he 
died. During his tenure of office in the Calcutta 
Garden, Wallich organised collecting expeuditions to 
the then little-known regions of Kamaon and Nepal 
(in the Himalaya), to Oudh, Rohilcund, Sylhet, Tenas- 
serim, Penang, and Singapore. He personally under- 
took in fact a botanical survey cf a large part of 
the Company's possessions in India. The vast mate- 
rials thus collected under his own immediate direc- 
tion, and the various contributions made by others, 
were taken to Ljndon by him in 1828. With these 
were subsequently incorporated the collections of 
Bussell, Klein, Heyne, Bottler, Buchanan-Hamilton, 
and Roxburgh. And by the help of a band of distin- 
guished European Botanists, among whom mav be 
named De CandoUe, Kunth, Lindley, Meissner, Nees 
von Esenbeck, Von Mattius, and Bentham (the latter 
in a very special manner), this vast mass of material 
was classified and named specifically. A catalogue 
of the collection was prepared by Wallich himself 
(largely aided by Bentham), and sets of the named 
specimens were distributed to the leading Botanical 
institutions in Europe, every example of each species 
bearing the same number. No description of the 
whole collection was ever attempted, but many of the 
plants belonging to it were subsequently described 
in various places and at various times. So extensive 
was the Wallichian distribution that, amongst the 
names and synonyms of tropical Asiatic plants, no 
citation is more fiequent in Botanical books than 
that of the contraction 'Wall. Cat.' Besides the nam- 
ing and distribution of this gigantic collection, Wal- 
lich prepared and published, at the expense of the 
same liberal and enlightened East India Company, 
his 'Plantee Asiaticae Bariores,' in three folio volumes 
with 300 coloured plates. Her also contributed to an 
edition of Roxburgh's ' Flora ludica,' which was be- 
gun by the celebrated Dr. Carey of Serampore, de- 
scriptions of many plants of his own collecting. But 
the task of publishing his discoveries in this way proved 
beyond his powers, as it would have proved beyond 
those of any one who had only 365 days to his %ear, 
and less than a hundred years as his term of life ! 
Carey and Wallich's edition of Roxburgh's 'Fioia 
Indica' was brought to an untimely conclusion f t 
the end of the Pentandria Mono(/;/nia of Linnajua. 
Wallich also began an illustrated account of the 
Flora of Nepal under the title ' Tentamun Florae 
Napalensis.' But this also came to a premature end 
with the publication of its second part. 
During much of the time that Wallich was labour- 
ing in Northern India, Robert Wight ; a botanist of 
remarkable sagacity and of boundless energy, was 
labouring in Southern India, chiefly in parts of the 
Peninsula different from those in which Koenig and 
his band had worked. AVight was never liberally sup- 
ported bv the Government of Madras, and it was mostly 
by his own efforts and from his own resources that his 
collections were made, and that his Botanical works 
were published- The chief of the latter is his ' Icones 
Plantarum.' This book consists of figures with des- 
criptions of more than two thousand Indian specieB, 
A good many of the plates are indeed copies from 
the suite of drawings already referred to as having 
been made at Calcutta by Dr. Roxburgh. The rest 
are from drawings made by native artists under his 
personal supervision. Ample evidence of the extra- 
ordinary energy of Dr. Wight is afforded by the facta 
that, although he had to teach the native artists 
whom he employed both to draw and to lithograph, 
the two thousand Iconcs which he published and de- 
scribed were issued during the short period of thirteen 
years, and that during the whole of this time he 
performed his official duties. 
Besides this magnum opus Wight published hia 
Spiciler/ium H'ilgliirense in two vols, quarto, with 20O 
coloured plates. And between 1840 and 1850 he issued 
in two vols, quarto, with 200 plates, another book 
named 'Illustrations of Indian Botany,' the object 
of which was to give figures and fuller descriptions 
of some of the chief species described in a systematic 
book of the highest Botanical merit, which he pre- 
pared conjointly with Dr. G. A. Walker-Arnot, IPro- 
fessor of IJotany in the University of Glasgow, and 
which was published under the title ' Prodromua 
Florae Peninsnlae Indicae.' The ' Prodromus ' was the 
first attempt at a Flora of any part of India in which 
the natural system of classification was followed. 
Owing to various causes, this work was never coBi- 
pleted, and this splendid fragment of a Flora of 
Peninsular India ends with the natural order Dipsacece. 
The next great Indian botanist whose labours de. 
mand our attention is William Griffith. Born in 1810, 
sixteen years after Wight, and twenty-four years 
later than Wallich, Griffith died before either. But 
the labours even of such devotees to science as were 
these two are quite eclipsed by those of this moat 
remarkable man. Griffith's Botanical career in India 
was begun in Tenasserim. From thence he made 
Botanical expeditions to the Assam valley, exploring 
the Mishmi, Khasia, and Naga ranges. From the 
latter he passed by a route never since traversed by 
a Botinist, through the Hookung valley down thp 
Irrawadi to Rangoon. Having been appointed, soon 
after his arrival in Rangoon, surgeon to Pemberton'a 
Embassy to Bhotan, he explored part of that country, 
and also sent collectors into the neighbouring one 
of SikkiiT). At the conclusion of this exploration he waa 
transferred to the opposite extremity of the Northern 
frontier, and waa posted to the Army of the Indua. 
After the subjugation of Cabul, he .penetrated to 
Khorassan. Subsequently he visited the portion of 
the Himalaya of which Simla is now the best-known 
spot. He then made a run down the Nerbudda 
valley in Central India, and finally appeared in 
Malacca as Civil Surgeon of that Settlement. At 
the latter place he soon died of an abscess of the 
liver brought on by the hardships he had undergone 
on his various travels, which were made under con- 
ditions most inimical to health, in countries then 
absolutely unvisited by Europeans. No Botanist ever 
made such extensive explorations, nor himself col- 
Ipfted so many species (9,000), as Griffith did during 
iliL- brief thirteen years of hia Indian career; none 
ever made so many field notes or wrote so many de- 
^criptions of plants from living specimens. Hia 
Botanical predecessors and contemporaries were men 
of ability and of devotion. Griffith was a man of 
genius. He did not confine himself to the study of 
flowering plants, nor to the study of them from the 
point of view of their place in any system of clas- 
sification. He also studied their morphology. The 
difficult problems in the latter naturally had moat 
attraction for him, and we find him publishing, in 
the 'Linnasan Transactions,' the results of hia re- 
searches on the ovule in Santalum, Loranthus, Vis- 
cum, and Ctjcas. Griffith was also a cryptogamist. 
He collected, studied, and wrote much on Mosaea, 
Liverworts, Marsiliacem, and Lycopods, and he made 
hundreds of drawings to illustrate his microscopic 
observations. Wherever he travelled he made sketches 
of the most striking features in the scenery. Ilia 
