INTO THE FLORA OF CHINA. 37 
Chinese plants, I must in the meantime leave the learned 
Fathers, and, to lay down in the order of time my material for 
a history of botanical discoveries in China, devote a chapter 
to an English naturalist, who in the very beginning of the 
18th century visited China. In another chapter I shall have 
to speak of some Swedish travellers and naturalists, who half 
a century and more later, collected plants in the neighborhood 
of Canton or left accounts of their botanical observations 
in China. 
II JAMES CUNNING-HAM 1702. 
Eleven years after E. Kaempfer had studied the Flora of 
Japan and brought home from that country about 500 plants, 
JAMES CnramGHAM, an Englishman, had the 
opportunity of investigating the Flora of China at several 
points in the Empire. He has the merit of having been the 
first European, who made botanical collections in China and 
whose rich herbarium safely arrived home, where it was 
described by several distinguished botanists of that time. 
The only biographical particulars I have been able to gather 
with respect to Cunningham are : that in 1698 he was sent to 
China as a physician to the English factory at Amoy. He 
visited also the island of Chusan and was subsequently 
transferred to the island of Pulu Condore, where the English 
had also established a factory. The publisher of the Philoso¬ 
phical Transactions styles him F. R. S. Besides his botanical 
collections made in China, he had sent also to England a few 
plants from the island of Ascension, gathered on his way to 
China. Comp. Pultney’s historical and biographical sketches 
of the progress of Botany (1790) II. 58—and •Sprengel’s 
Geschichte der Botanik, II. 79. 
In the Philosophical Transactions of the year 1702, vol. 
XXIII. p. 1201. sqq. two of Cunningham’s letters treating of 
China and addressed to the editor of that Journal, have been 
published. As they are not very long, I shall reproduce them 
here, adding occasionally some explanatory notes. An abstract 
of these letters has already been given in vol. ix. p. 133 of the 
Chin. Repository. 
It appears from the first of these letters that the ship in 
which Cunningham came out to China proceeded directly from 
England to Chusan. He does not allude in his letters, both 
written in 1701, to his stay at Amoy. But as among his 
Chusan plants described by Petiver we find also several noted 
as having been gathered on the island of Emuy, we can 
