Page:Proceedings of the Royal Society of London Vol 7.djvu/304

 industry to the extension of the gardens, the investigation of the East India Company's vast and then rapidly increasing dominions, and the establishment of a correspondence and exchange of living and dried plants, upon a scale which for magnitude and efficiency has never been surpassed by any scientific establishment whatever. During the first ten years of his incumbency he performed five extensive journeys; he visited Nepaul, then a terra incognita, in 1820–1822, and on his return through the pestilential Tarai, at the foot of the Himalayas, caught a second severe fever that obliged him to go to sea immediately after his arrival at Calcutta. This opportunity he turned to the best account, and as soon as he could rise from his bed and superintend his staff, he commenced diligently investigating the botany of the Bay of Bengal, Penang, and the Straits of Malacca.

Within less than another year Dr.Wallich was personally exploring the kingdom of Oude and the provinces of Rohilcund and Kamaon, reporting on their forests and other vegetable products; and in 1826–1827, he accompanied the British embassy to Burmah, visited Ava, and after that the newly-acquired provinces of Tenasserim and Martaban. Throughout this period he employed collectors in eastern Bengal, and in other parts of India which he could not himself visit; and he communicated (in the name of the Hon. E. I. Company) the products of these labours with a lavish liberality to the botanists of Europe, not only in the form of collections, but of voluminous observations and drawings.

Repeated attacks of illness obliged Dr. Wallich to repair to England, where he arrived on furlough in 1828, and applied himself assiduously for four years to the publication of his great work "Plantse Asiatics rariores," in three volumes folio, and the distribution of his enormous collections to the principal public and private museums in Europe. This distribution, of which a catalogue was lithographed by his own hand, constitutes the most valuable contribution of its kind ever made to botanists, and is of itself a sufficient monument of one man's devotion to science.

Dr. Wallich returned to India in 1832, when it soon became apparent that his constitution was completely undermined by incessant labour of both mind and body. For several years he conducted the garden correspondence with his wonted zeal and vigour, and