SPECIES OE EICUS
INDO-MALAYAN AND CHINESE COUNTRIES.
I N T R O D U C T I O N .
THE genus Fictif was founded by Liniiasus, and in the fii-st edition of bis Species
Plantarum lie described seven species, fom- of "ïvliicli arc Indian. By the time
Sprengel's edition of Linnceus' Systerna appeared (1825 to 1828) the number of species
had risen to 118, of which 50 were from the Indo-Malayan region. In 1825 Blume's
Bijdragen was published, and in it there are descriptions of 93 species of Malayan figs, of
which 82 were described for the first time. Roxburgh's Flora Indica, although completed
before the author's death in 1815, was not published until 1832, and in it 55 Indian
species ai-e described. Of these species, 41 bore Roxburgh's name as their author ; but
only about 15 of them had previously been midescribed. Although Giertner had given a
fairly good description of the achenes of F. carica and of F. religiosa, yet, between the
time of Linnoeus and that of Roxburgh, systematic writers had paid but little attention
to the structure of the flowers and to the mode of then- an-angement on the receptacles,
tlie species being founded piu-ely on external charactcrs. The remarks of Linnasus himself
on the common eatable Fig in the Hortus Cliffortiamis (published five years before the
first edition of his Gmera Plantarum) show that he had a clearer apprehension of the
actual arrangements of the sexes than most of the writers who succeeded him. In tlie
Hortus Oiifortianus Linnajus reduces to the same species the Fig, the Caprifig, and
erinosyce ; regarding the Caprifig as the male, the Fig as the female, and crinosyce as the
hermaphrodite form of one and the same species. In the first edition of the Species
Fluntarum Linnoeus put the genus Ficus into his class Cnjptogamia, but in the second
edition he transferred it to Polì/gamia Polyoecia, thus confirming the view as to the nature of
the arrangements of the flowers of the common Fig which he had expressed in the Hortus
CHffortiamiS. In his Enumcralion (1806) Vahl put Ficus into Triandria Monogynia, thus showing
that he not only completely misunderstood the sexual arrangements, but that he could
never have even counted the stamens. In Sprcngel's edition of Linneeus just quoted, Fictis
is put into a section of Monoecia called Androgynia, from the supposition that flowers of