BOTANICAL OBSERVATIONS

ON

SELECT INDIAN PLANTS*.

BY THE PRESIDENT.

'IF my names of plants displease you, fays the great Swedish botanist,

⚫ choose others more agreeable to your taste,' and, by this candour, he has difarmed all the criticism, to which as it must be allowed, even the critical parts of his admirable works lie continually open: I avail myself of his indulgence, and am very solicitous to give Indian plants their true Indian appellations; because I am fully perfuaded, that LINNÆUS himself would have adopted them, had he known the learned and ancient language of this country; as he, like all other men, would have retained the native names of Afiatick regions and cities, rivers and mountains, leaving friends or perfons of eminence to preserve their own names by their own merit, and inventing new ones, from distinguishing marks and properties, for fuch objects only as, being recently discovered, could have had no previous denomination. Far am I from doubting the

* This paper was announced in the fpecimen of an Afiatick Common-place Book, which the Prefident added, in the third volume of these Transactions, to Mr. HARINGTON's propofal for an im provement of LOCKE's useful plan.

great

great importance of perfect botanical defcriptions; for languages expire as nations decay, and the true sense of many appellatives in every dead language must be lost in a course of ages: but, as long as those appellatives remain understood, a travelling phyfician, who fhould wish to procure an Arabian or Indian plant, and, without asking for it by its learned or vulgar name, fhould hunt for it in the woods by its botanical character, would resemble a geographer, who, defiring to find his way in a foreign city or province, should never inquire by name for a street or a town, but wait with his tables and inftruments, for a proper occa→ fion to determine its longitude and latitude.

The plants, described in the following paper by their claffical appellations, with their fynonyma or epithets, and their names in the vulgar dialects, have been felected for their novelty, beauty, poetical fame, reputed use in medicine, or fuppofed holiness; and frequent allusions to them all will be found, if the Sanferit language fhould ever be generally ftudied, in the popular and facred poems of the ancient Hindus, in their medical books and lawtracts, and even in the Védas themfelves: though unhappily I cannot profess, with the fortunate Swede, to have seen without glaffes all the parts of the flowers, which I have described, yet you may be affured, that I have mentioned no part of them, which I have not again and again examined with my own eyes; and though the weaknefs of my fight will for ever prevent my becoming a botanist, yet I have in some little degree atoned for that fatal defect by extreme attention, and by an ardent zeal for the moft lovely and fafcinating branch of natural knowledge.

Before I was acquainted with the method pursued by VAN RHEede, neceffity had obliged me to follow a fimilar plan on a smaller scale; and, as his mode of studying botany, in a country and climate by no means favourable to botanical excurfions, may be adopted more fuc

cessfully