| | Detail | In Upper Gower-street, in his 68th year, Nathaniel Wallich, M.D., F.R.A.S. and a Vice-President of the Linnaean Society. By birth a Dane, Dr Wallich entered the medical service of his country when very young, and was in 1807 attached as surgeon to the Danish East India settlement of Serampore. When that place was taken by the English, such of the Danish officers as desired were permitted to enter the service of the East India Company, an advantage of which Dr Wallich availed himself, and this circumstance ultimately led to his arriving at the highest botanical position known in India. His extensive acquaintance with plants soon attracted the attention of the Indian government, especially at a time when very few of the Company's servants had any knowledge of the subject. Upon Dr Hamilton's resigning charge of the important botanical garden at Calcutta in 1815, Dr Wallich was appointed superintendent, and from that time forward his activity in collecting plants from all parts of our Indian empire, in describing them, causing them to be drawn, and in dispatching fine specimens of them to his adopted country, was unexampled. From 1821 to 1828 there was scarcely an English garden of magnitude that was not much indebted to his liberality. In 1820, in conjunction with Dr Carey, he commenced the publication of Roxburgh's ""Flora Indica,"" which was greatly augmented by his own discoveries. As soon as the new art of lithography was made available in India, it was seized upon as a ready means of placing before the world the little-known plants of Nepaul, which was done in the ""Tentamen Florae Nepalensis,"" a folio volume. For this large materials had been accumulated during the author's official examination of that province in 1820. In 1825 he was deputed by the government to inspect the timber forests of Western Hindostan. In 1826 and 1827 he was in Ava and the newly-acquired Burmese territory. In 1828 the state of his health, which had become greatly impaired, rendered his return to Europe inevitable. Then it was that he brought with him visible proofs of his never-tiring zeal in the pursuit of science. Eight thousand species of plants collected by himself, together with an incredible number of duplicates, safely arrived in London, and were speedily, at his recommendation, dispersed through the public and private herbaria of Europe and America. This East India Company sanctioned this great operation, with a noble spirit defraying the whole cost in a manner most honourable to themselves. His ""List of Plants from the dried specimens in the East India Company's Museum,"" forms a large folio of 265 pages printed in lithography. At the same time that the laborious work of distribution was going on, Dr Wallich's magnum opus, the ""Plantae Asiaticae Rariores"" was passing through the press, and eventually, in August 1832, formed three folio volumes, each containing 100 coloured plates. Shortly afterwards Dr Wallich returned to his official duties in India, when he was appointed to the chief direction of a scientific party directed to explore the newly-acquired province of Assam, especially with a view to determine the nature of the tea cultivation that had been ascertained to exist there. Ill-health still pursued him, and after a visit to the Cape of Good Hope , and a further attempt to struggle against a climate which had always proved his most dangerous enemy, he finally bade adieu to Hindostan, and reached England with his family in 1847, to enjoy, alas ! for too brief a space, the repose and honours to which he had gained a just title by a most arduous life. By those who knew him intimately, Dr Wallich will be much regretted, for he was not only a most enthusiastic botanist and a learned man, but a charming companion, as well as a warm and steady friend. Gardener's Chronicle. |
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