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, Pram, has been already dealt 
with [K.B. 1902? p. ll], 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 m the Calcutta market, m 
contradistinction to the market of Bombay, where at one tune the 
Patchapat offered for sale was derived from a cultivated state ot 
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 ingers 
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 
Heyneanus— he had used the name for the first time LWall, 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 o 
Mindanao, though as yet nowhere else in that group. When the nature 
