INTRODUCTION. 
lv 
foreign medicinal plants, especially of America, were brought to 
aud naturalized in India by the Portuguese, Dutch, and other 
maritime nations. Agave Americana, Ananasa sativa, Anona 
squamosa, and several other-native plants of America are now to 
be met with throughout the peninsula of Hindustan. Von Rheede 
tried to gather all the informations about the medicinal uses of 
the plants of this country in his Ilortus Malabarica, which should 
be looked upon as the first systematic work by a European, giv- 
ing the medicinal uses of the plants of India. But little attention 
was paid to the medicinal plants of this country till the founda- 
tion of the Asiatic Society of Bengal. The Society was estab- 
lished mainly through the exertions of Sir Wiliam Jones, who 
was its first president. He was as great a botanist as a classical 
scholar. He looked upon the Society as corresponding in its 
aims and objects to the Royal Society of England. The Asiatic 
Society has fulfilled the expectations of its gifted founder. Sir 
William Jones himself pointed out the importance and necessity 
of studying the Indian medicinal plants. In a paper on the 
design of a treatise on the plants of India, read by him before 
the Bengal Asiatic Society, he said that “Some hundreds of 
plants which are yet imperfectly known to European botanists 
and with the virtues of which they are wholly unacquainted, 
grow wild on the plains aud in the forests of India. The 
Amarakoshu, an excellent vocabulary of the Sanskrit language, 
contains in one chapter the names of about 300 medicinal 
vegetables ; the Medini may comprise many more ; and the 
Dravydbhidhana or Dictionary of natural productions includes, 
I believe, a far greater number, the properties of which are 
distinctly related in medical tracts of approved authority.” 3 
The example set by Sir William Jones was not lost upon his 
successors. Roxburgh, the Linnaeus of Indian Botany, collected 
all the informations about the medicinal plants of this country 
in his Flora Indica. Professor Lindley in his work on Flora 
Medica is indebted for his information regarding the medicinal 
plants of India to Roxburgh’s magnum opus. Roxburgh’s 
Flora Indica was an authority on the medicinal plants of this 
* Sir Wm, Jones’ Works, London, 1799, vol. II, p. 2, 
