Fig 2

XXXIII.

BOTANICAL OBSERVATIONS

ON

THE SPIKENARD OF THE ANCIENTS:

INTENDED AS A SUPPLEMENT TO THE LATE

SIR WILLIAM JONES'S PAPERS ON THAT PLANT.

BY WILLIAM ROXBURGH, M. D.

VALERIANA JATAMANSI.

GENERIC CHARACTER.

FLOWERS pair petioled, and cordate; the rest

LOWERS triandrous, leaves entire, four-fold, the

smaller, sessile, and sub-lanceolate; seeds crowned with a pappus.

V. Jatamansi of Sir William Jones. See Asiatic Researches, vol. ii. page 405 and 417, and page 105 of this volume.

November 6th, 1794. I received from the Honourable C. A. Bruce, commissioner at Coos-Beyhar, two small baskets with plants of this valuable drug. He writes to me on the 27th September (so long had the plants been on the road) that he had, the day before, received them from the Deb Rajah of Bootan; VOL. IV. Ff

and further says, that the Booteahs know the plant by two names, viz. Jatamansi and Pampé, or Paumpé.

I need scarce attempt to give any further history of this famous odoriferous plant than what is merely botanical and that with a view to help to illustrate the learned dissertations thereon, by the late Sir William Jones, in the 2d and 4th volumes of these Researches; and chiefly by pointing out the part of the plant known by the name Indian Nard, or Spikenard: a question on which Mathiolus, the commentator of Dioscorides, bestows a great deal of argument; viz. Whether the roots or stalks were the parts esteemed for use? the testimony of the ancients themselves on this head, being ambiguous. It is therefore necessary for those who wish for a more particular account of it, to be acquainted with what that gentleman has published on the subject.

The plants now received, are growing in two small baskets of earth; in each basket there appears above the earth between thirty and forty hairy spike-like bodies, but more justly compared to the tails of Ermines, or small Weasels*; from the apex of each, or at least of the greatest part of them, there is a smooth lanceolate or lanceolate-oblong, three or five-nerved, short-petioled, acute or obtuse, slightly serrulate leaf or two shooting forth. Fig. 1, represents one of them in the above state; and on gently removing the fibres or hairs which surround the short petiols of these leaves, I find it consists of numerous sheaths, of which one, two, or three of the upper or interior ones are entire, and have their fibres connected by a light

* The term spica, or spike, is not so ill applied to this substance as may be imagined; several of the Indian grasses, well known to me, have spikes almost exactly resembling a single straight piece of nardus: and when those hairs (or flexible arista, like bristles) are removed, Pliny's words, "frutex radice pingui et crassa," are by no means inapplicable. See fig. 2, from a to b.