MISSIONARIES AND CLERGYMEN AS BOTANISTS IN INDIA AND PAKISTAN

Until recent years in India the Central Government only supported a few botanists who served in the Botanical Survey of India. Pakistan does not have a Botanical Survey and has only one botanist who is in charge of the new National Herbarium. A large amount of the plant collecting which was done in India from the days of the East India Company to the present was the work of amateurs living in India or by foreigners of many nations. The only history in which one can find the names of many of these workers is that of Isaac H. Burkill (1870-1965), who served in the Indian Forest Service for many years and was the first to publish a check-list of the plants of Baluchistan in 1909. Unfortunately he intentionally stopped his history at 1900, omitting hundreds of names of people who worked after that date. Only a few references to events after 1900 slipped in. His history entitled "Chapters on the history of botany in India" was published in parts in the Journal of the Bombay Natural History Society, 1957-63, and in 1965 was published in book form by the Botanical Survey of India in Calcutta. It is a mine of information but the ore is often so scattered that it is hard to find. It is surprising how many people in India were interested in plant collecting, even in the early days, while the East India Company was in control i.e. before 1857. The Company may only have been interested in ways of making money, but many of their servants were interested in the languages, religions, customs, architecture and natural history of the country in which they lived for longer or shorter periods. Burkill was very much interested in the large number of Army officers, including some generals and the large numbers of medical men who were among the collectors. As I collected the names of authors and collectors who have worked in the Indo-