Samuel Browne’s late 17th century Indian herbarium: identifications and early modern taxonomic practice

ABSTRACT

Samuel Browne (b.-? d. 21st December 1698) was a surgeon employed by the English East India Company (EIC) at Fort St. George, Madras (now Chennai) in India. In 1697, Browne sent a herbarium of 316 specimens collected in and around Chennai to the EIC. Many of those specimens were accompanied with vernacular names, descriptions and notes on their properties and uses. Browne’s specimens were studied by James Petiver who published descriptions with Browne as co-author. Those descriptions made reference to polynomial names in many other published works. In this paper we present a description of the Browne herbarium and identifications for all specimens, with 313 of the 316 specimens identified to species level. We also examine how knowledge from the specimens sent by Browne was integrated with existing knowledge in published works. We show that specimens with a medicinal or other use recorded by Browne were more extensively referenced to other literature than those with no use documented, likely reflecting the fact that plants with documented uses were more likely to have been studied previously. Contrary to our expectations, we found no difference in the extent of referencing to other works when comparing widespread species with species endemic to the Indian subcontinent. The ethnobotanical information recorded in Browne’s herbarium, used in conjunction with the identifications provided in this paper, provides a unique resource for understanding plants in 17th century Tamil Nadu and Andhra Pradesh.

KEYWORDS:

• Ethnobotany
• East India company
• Herbaria
• India
• medicinal plants
• plant uses
• vernacular names
• 17th century

Acknowledgments

We are grateful to the following persons for assistance with the identification of specimens: Althaf Ahamed Kabeer, Gopal Krishna, Vivek Kumar, Pushpa Kumari, Prasanna Parigi, Dilip Roy, Basant Singh, Paramjit Singh, (Botanical Survey of India); J. Venkat Sudhakar (Pondicherry University); Rinkuben Desai, Nicolas Hind, Lulu Rico (Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew); Vilma Bharatan, Charlie Jarvis, Sandra Knapp, Fred Rumsey; Jacek Wajer, Jovita Yesilyurt (Natural History Museum), and Rajdendra Shinde (St. Xavier’s College, Mumbai). Ravi Kumar, Arun Kumar (Foundation for Revitalization of Local Health Traditions, Bengaluru), and Manoj Chandran (Principal Commissioner of Forests, Dehradun) also assisted with interpretation of Tamil names. G. Gnanasekaran (Madras Christian College, Chennai) helped with literature, A. Raman (Charles Sturt University, Australia) assisted with interpreting Browne’s plant collecting localities and Jeewan Singh Jalal (Botanical Survey of India) assisted with the preparation of the map. Anna Winterbottom (McGill University, Canada) kindly helped with locating historical references and shared her doctoral thesis. At the Natural History Museum, London we are grateful to Andrea Hart, Angela Thresher and John Rose for library assistance, Jonathan Jackson for imaging of watermarks and Grace Touzel and Konstantina Konstantinadou for help with the identification of those. We are also grateful to Alex Ball for help with formatting the images.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Author contributions

Ranee Om Prakash led on design of the research, data gathering, analysis, interpretation and writing of the manuscript; Mark Carine and Julie Hawkins supervised the work, contributed to the design of the research, data analysis, interpretation and writing; Caroline Whiteford, V. Sampath Kumar, W. Arisdason and Rajdeo Singh contributed to the identification of plant specimens and approved the manuscript with V. Sampath Kumar and W. Arisdason also contributing to the interpretation of Tamil vernacular names.

Data availability statement

The authors confirm that the data supporting the findings of this study are available within the article and its supplementary materials.

Supplementary data

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1080/23818107.2023.2296095

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.