foreign medicinal plants, especially of America, were brought to and 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 Hortus Malabarica, which should be looked upon as the first systematic work by a European, giving the medicinal uses of the plants of India. But little attention was paid to the medicinal plants of this country till the foundation of the Asiatic Society of Bengal. The Society was established mainly through the exertions of Sir Willam 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 and in the forests of India. The Amarakosha, 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 Dravyabhidhana 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."[1]
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.
