Contributions to Indian Botany

Abstract

THE whole of this volume, like the first, with the exception of a part of the Appendix, is the work of Dr. G. King, the Director of the Calcutta Botanic Garden. It contains a monograph of the species of Artocarpus indigenous to British India, and a monograph of the Indo-Malayan species of Quercus and Castanopsis, both fully and excellently illustrated. The genus Artocarpus was founded by the Forsters (father and son, who accompanied Captain Cook on his second voyage, not brothers, as inadvertently stated by Dr. King) for the bread-fruit tree, with which they became familiar in the Pacific Islands. This they called Artocarpus communis, though most subsequent botanists have adopted the later Linnean name, A. incisa; and the younger Forster published a separate illustrated memoir on it, in German, entitled “The History and Description of the Bread-fruit Tree.”Dampier, however, appears to have been the first to make this valuable tree known to Europeans. The only other familiar species of the genus is the Jak fruit (Artocarpus integrifolia), a prominent cultivated tree in the Malay peninsula and archipelago, and recently collected by Colonel Beddome in a wild state in the forests of the Western Ghats in the Deccan Peninsula, South India. Exclusive of this, Dr. King now describes and figures seventeen species found within the limits of British India, seven of which are described for the first time. Many of them are very handsome trees, but their wood is of little value, and, as far as their history goes, none yields an edible fruit. Annals of the Royal Botanic Garden, Calcutta. Vol. II. Pp. 110; with 104 Lithographed Plates. (Calcutta; Bengal Secretariat Press, 1889.)