Nathaniel Wallich
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| Nathaniel Wallich | |
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 The Kew sheet that carries Wallich 4665 H, cannabis gathered at Tong Dong in Burma in 1826, beside collection G of the same number, from Nepal in 1821 (CC BY 4.0)
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| Born | 28 January 1786 Copenhagen, Denmark |
| Died | 28 April 1854 London, England |
| Nationality | Danish |
| Occupation | Surgeon and botanist |
| Institutions | East India Company; Calcutta Botanic Garden |
| Known for | The East India Company's herbarium and its Numerical List |
| Collector name on accessions | N. Wallich |
| Botanical author abbreviation | Wall. |
Nathaniel Wallich (28 January 1786 – 28 April 1854) was a Danish surgeon and botanist who had charge of the East India Company's botanic garden at Calcutta from 1815 until the 1840s.[1][2] He built up the Company's herbarium from his own journeys, from collectors paid by the Bengal government and from Company officials across British India. In London between 1828 and 1832 he sorted it into duplicate sets and listed it in a lithographed Numerical List, which botanists call the Wallich Catalogue.[2] Number 4665 of the list is Cannabis sativa. It comprises eight lots, two of them gathered by Wallich himself, in Nepal in 1821 and at Tong Dong in Burma in 1826.[3] The top set of the herbarium is at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew.[4]
The Linnean Society's obituary of 1854 and the Dictionary of National Biography (1899) date his birth at Copenhagen to 28 January 1786. The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography gives 1785 and an earlier form of his name, Nathanael Wulff Wallich.[1][5][6] His standard label name is N. Wallich. His botanical author abbreviation is Wall.[7][8]
Serampore and Calcutta
Wallich studied botany at Copenhagen under Martin Vahl.[1][5] In 1807, aged 21, he went to India as surgeon to the Danish settlement at Serampore. In Bengal he came to know William Roxburgh, superintendent of the Company's botanic garden at Calcutta.[1] When the British took Serampore, Danish officers who wished to were allowed to enter the Company's service. Wallich was one of them.[9][5] In 1814 he proposed a museum to the council of the Asiatic Society in Calcutta and took charge of it on 1 June 1814 as its first curator. That collection is now the Indian Museum.[10]
Early in 1815 Francis Buchanan-Hamilton left the Calcutta garden for England. Wallich was given temporary charge of it.[1][5] The appointment was made permanent in August 1817. He held the post until 1846.[10][2] Roxburgh had kept few dried specimens in Calcutta because of the climate and insect pests, relying instead on paintings. Wallich began to assemble dried material at the garden on a large scale.[2] More than 300 people worked in the garden. Collectors attached to it were stationed in Sylhet, Nepal, Kumaon and Penang.[1] He persuaded the Bengal government to pay for professional plant collectors. Company officials in all four presidencies, especially in the medical and military services, sent him specimens, seeds, timber and living plants.[2]
In 1820 the missionary William Carey began to publish Roxburgh's Flora Indica at Serampore. Wallich added descriptions of newly discovered plants to the first two volumes, but Carey completed the work alone.[1][5] Wallich received the MD of Marischal College and the University of Aberdeen in 1819. He was a fellow of the Linnean Society from 1818 and was elected a fellow of the Royal Society in 1829.[5] In 1837 and 1838 he was professor of botany at the Calcutta Medical College.[10]
Journeys
Ill health took Wallich to Mauritius in 1812.[1] In 1819 he collected near the Nepalese border in Bihar.[11] The government sent him to Nepal in 1820. He stayed until the beginning of 1822.[1] In Nepal he was with the British Resident, Edward Gardner. He gathered living, dried and spirit material there.[11] Sets of the Nepal plants went at once to herbaria in London and elsewhere.[1] Two numbers of his Tentamen Florae Napalensis Illustratae, each of 25 lithographed plates, were printed at Serampore in 1824 and 1826. The drawings and the lithographs were made by local artists under his direction.[1][5]
A fever caught on the way down from Nepal sent him on a five-month voyage to Penang, Singapore and other places in the Straits of Malacca. He returned on the last day of 1822 with large collections.[1] In 1825 the government sent him to inspect the timber forests of the western provinces. He collected in Oudh, Rohilkhand and the Dehra valley.[1] In 1826 and 1827 he went with John Crawfurd's mission to the court of Ava in Burma, now Myanmar, and then to the newly ceded coasts of Martaban and Tenasserim to assess their timber.[11][1] Material he collected before 1827 entered his catalogue without a collector's name. For other material the catalogue names the collector beside the locality.[11]
Wallich returned to India in 1833 and resumed charge of the garden.[1] Soon afterwards he led a scientific mission to Assam, with John McClelland and William Griffith, to report on the tea plant growing there, Camellia sinensis var. assamica.[1][11] His health failed again in 1843 and he went to the Cape of Good Hope.[1] In South Africa he visited the Cederberg and the Eastern Cape.[11]
The East India Company herbarium
In 1828 Wallich was given two and a half years' leave, partly for his health and partly as a scientific sabbatical. He took the unmounted herbarium to London with its related specimens and 1,200 drawings by the garden's artists.[2] The collections travelled in 30 barrels weighing 20 tons. Working from a rented house at 61 Frith Street in Soho with help from taxonomists across Europe, he named the specimens and sorted them into more than 60 duplicate sets. After two extensions of his leave he stayed in London from July 1828 to October 1832.[2]
The list was published as A Numerical List of Dried Specimens of Plants in the East India Company's Museum.[5] The pages were written by hand, by Wallich and later partly by George Bentham, and reproduced by transfer lithography so that recipients could cut them up for labels.[4][2] Each species received a number. A letter or number suffix distinguished collections from different places or collectors. Few collections are dated.[2] The 306 printed pages list 9,148 entries (usually species) and 20,897 collections.[12] The main distribution ran from December 1828 to the summer of 1832 and ended at entry 7683, on page 253. Wallich sent tens of thousands of duplicates to over 60 botanists and institutions in Europe and to one in North America.[4]
The Company's Court of Directors presented the complete type set to the Linnean Society in 1832, on Wallich's recommendation.[1] It has been kept at Kew since 1913 as the Wallich Herbarium (K-W). Duplicates are in many other herbaria, including Calcutta (CAL).[2][4] The Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh publishes the catalogue online. Its additions and corrections are gathered under each entry. Its collections are renumbered so that each can be cited.[12]
Over the same years Wallich published Plantae Asiaticae Rariores in three folio volumes (London, 1830–1832), with 300 coloured plates drawn mainly from the garden's 1,200 drawings.[1] A map of his journeys and those of other collectors is printed at the back of its third volume.[11]
Cannabis specimens
Entry 4665 of the catalogue, Cannabis sativa L., is printed on page 166 with six lots, A to F. Lot B, Hb. Roxb. e Bareilly, came from Roxburgh's herbarium and was gathered at Bareilly. Lot E reads Hb. Wight, for the herbarium of Robert Wight. Lot F reads HBC.[3] Two more lots were added on page 215. Lot G reads Napaliae 1821. The online catalogue places it in Nepal, mainly the Kathmandu Valley. Lot H reads Toong Dong 1826, from Tong Dong in Burma. The printed lots give a place and a year. The online catalogue attributes both to Wallich as collector.[3]
The online catalogue links ten Kew specimens to the eight lots. Lots G and H are mounted on one sheet as K001039639 and K001039640.[3] The Tong Dong plant of lot H is Wallich 4665 H (1826). The Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh holds sheets of lot E (Wallich 4665E (by 1832)) and lot F (Wallich 4665F (by 1832)).[13][14] Other cannabis sheets under Wallich's name are at Meise Botanic Garden (two sheets, one numbered 4665) and at Charles University in Prague, where a sheet numbered 4665 b carries the year 1831. A sheet at the Muséum national d'Histoire naturelle in Paris is annotated as given by Wallich in 1837.[15]
Accessions collected by Wallich:
| Collected | Locality | Repository | Catalogue number | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Wallich 4665 H (1826) | Tong Dong | Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew | K001039640 |
Later life
Wallich went back to Calcutta from the Cape, but left India for good and reached England with his family in 1847.[1][9] Sources differ on when he resigned the superintendence. The Flora Malesiana cyclopaedia of collectors dates his resignation to 1846. The Dictionary of National Biography dates it to 1850, when John Scott, gardener to the Duke of Devonshire at Chatsworth, succeeded him.[16][5] He became a vice-president of the Linnean Society in 1849 and often presided at its meetings.[1][5] He died at his house in Upper Gower Street, London, on 28 April 1854 and was buried at Kensal Green Cemetery.[1]
The East India Company raised an obelisk to his memory in the Calcutta garden.[5] The Linnean Society holds an oil portrait of him by John Lucas, painted in 1832.[2][5] The palm genus Wallichia, named by Roxburgh, commemorates him.[5][16] His son George Charles Wallich (1815–1899) entered the Indian Medical Service in 1838 and later worked on marine biology.[5]
See also
References
- ↑ 1.00 1.01 1.02 1.03 1.04 1.05 1.06 1.07 1.08 1.09 1.10 1.11 1.12 1.13 1.14 1.15 1.16 1.17 1.18 1.19 1.20 1.21 "Anniversary Meeting". Proceedings of the Linnean Society of London. 2: 314–317. 24 May 1854 – via Internet Archive.
- ↑ 2.00 2.01 2.02 2.03 2.04 2.05 2.06 2.07 2.08 2.09 2.10 Noltie, Henry; Watson, Mark (3 February 2021). "The Collectors of the Wallich (or East India Company) Herbarium". Botanics Stories. Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh. Retrieved 8 October 2026.
- ↑ 3.0 3.1 3.2 3.3 "4665: Cannabis sativa L." Wallich Catalogue Online. Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh. Retrieved 8 October 2026.
- ↑ 4.0 4.1 4.2 4.3 Watson, Mark (21 February 2013). "The Wallich Catalogue Project". Botanics Stories. Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh. Retrieved 8 October 2026.
- ↑ 5.00 5.01 5.02 5.03 5.04 5.05 5.06 5.07 5.08 5.09 5.10 5.11 5.12 5.13 Boulger, George Simonds (1899). "Wallich, Nathaniel". Dictionary of National Biography. Vol. 59. London: Smith, Elder & Co. pp. 135–136 – via Wikisource.
- ↑ Boulger, G. S. (23 September 2004). "Wallich, Nathaniel [formerly Nathanael Wulff Wallich] (1785–1854), botanist". In Grout, Andrew (ed.). Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/28564.
- ↑ "Wallich, Nathaniel". Index of Botanists. Harvard University Herbaria. Botanist ID 776. Retrieved 8 October 2026.
- ↑ "Wallich, Nathaniel (1786–1854)". International Plant Names Index. Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew; Harvard University Herbaria; Australian National Herbarium. Author ID 12990-1. Retrieved 8 October 2026.
- ↑ 9.0 9.1 "Nathaniel Wallich, M.D., F.R.As.S." Obituary. The Gentleman's Magazine. New series. 42: 84. July 1854 – via Internet Archive.
- ↑ 10.0 10.1 10.2 Akhter, Nasrin. "Wallich, Nathaniel". Banglapedia: National Encyclopedia of Bangladesh. Retrieved 8 October 2026.
- ↑ 11.0 11.1 11.2 11.3 11.4 11.5 11.6 Watson, Mark (15 January 2019). "Wallich's Expeditions". Botanics Stories. Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh. Retrieved 8 October 2026.
- ↑ 12.0 12.1 "The Wallich Catalogue Online". Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh. Retrieved 8 October 2026.
- ↑ "Occurrence 575107162: Cannabis sativa L." GBIF. Global Biodiversity Information Facility. Retrieved 8 October 2026.
- ↑ "Occurrence 575043284: Cannabis sativa L." GBIF. Global Biodiversity Information Facility. Retrieved 8 October 2026.
- ↑ "Occurrence search: Cannabis sativa, Wallich". GBIF. Global Biodiversity Information Facility. Retrieved 8 October 2026.
- ↑ 16.0 16.1 "Wallich, Nathaniel = Nathan Wolff". Flora Malesiana: Cyclopaedia of Collectors. Nationaal Herbarium Nederland. Retrieved 8 October 2026.