Page:The Flora of British India Vol 1.djvu/11



The Flora of British India is intended to comprise within a moderate compass brief descriptions, ordinal, g-eneric and specific, of the Flowering plants and Ferns hitherto found within the British territories in India, together with those of Kashmir and Western Tibet; countries which, though outside that territory, belong to botanical regions included within it, which have been geo^aphically and botanically explored by officers employed almost exclusively in the Indian service, and which are habitually visited by Indian tourists and travellers. It was originally intended to have included the Floras of Affghanistan and Beluchistan, as was done in the fragmentary "Flora Indica," commenced in 1855 by Dr. T. Thomson and myself j but the plants of these countries having been recently included in Boissier's excellent "Flora Orientalis," and belonging to quite another botanical region (the Occidental Asiatic), this intention has been abandoned.

At the outset it must be stated, that in a work of this scope, neither fulness nor completeness are attainable in the present state of science. British Indian Botany is represented by some 12-14,000 species, and by hundreds of thousands of specimens, collected over an area of one and a half millions of square miles, in tropical, temperate, and frigid climates, and at all elevations, from the sea-level to 19,000 ft. Of this vast assemblage, not a twelfth part has hitherto been brought together in any one general work on Indian plants. The descriptions of such as are well described, are scattered through innumerable British and foreign journals, or contained in Local Floras, or works on general Botany 5 a very large number are described so incompletely or inaccurately, that they can only be recognised after an inspection of the original specimens j and very many are altogether undescribed. In short, there is no quarter of the globe so rich in plants, and from which such a mass of materials has been collected and deposited in European