Herbaria as manuscripts: Philology,ethnobotany,and the textual–visual mesh of early modern botany

Abstract

While interest in early modern herbaria has so far mainly concentrated on the dried plants stored in them, this paper addresses another of their qualities – their role as manuscripts. In the 1670s, the German botanist Paul Hermann (1646–95) spent several years in Ceylon (today Sri Lanka) as a medical officer in the service of the Dutch East India Company. During his stay he put together four herbaria, two of which contain a wealth of handwritten notes by himself and several later owners. First, it will be shown that these notes provide information on the linguistic skills and interests of those who collected plants in an overseas trading settlement. Hermann’s botanical practice demanded and, at the same time, generated knowledge of Sinhalese (an Indo-Aryan language that is spoken by the largest ethnic group on the island) and its script. In his herbarium, observations on the semantics, morphology, and pronunciation of Sinhalese are inextricably intertwined with those of botanical nature. Second, on the basis of these voluminous notes, the character of early modern herbaria as manuscripts will be highlighted. And third, Hermann’s herbaria will be integrated into an investigation of scribal practices and publication strategies of eighteenth-century botany. Along with field notes, letters, manuscripts, illustrations, and printed books, herbaria were knots in the textual–visual mesh of early modern botany.

Introduction

Herbaria were, and still are, one of the central repositories for botanical practice. While present-day botanists primarily focus on whether historical herbaria contain type specimens, for early modern botanists they were indispensable tools of their daily scholarly work. Many of them possessed herbaria, as evidenced by the correspondence that accompanied the international exchange of plants and seeds. ¹ Some of them developed specific methods for their use, such as, notably, the Swedish botanist Carolus Linnaeus (1707–78), who devised a technique of successively comparing plants as well as specimens from herbaria in order to create his “natural characters.” In one of the few existing studies on the role of herbaria in the taxonomic practice of early modern botany, Staffan Müller-Wille shows how Linnaeus went about this. ² With some studies dedicated to the history of individual herbaria and, further afield, to the ethics and aesthetics of using them, interest so far has mainly concentrated on the dried plants contained in them. ³

In recent years, ethnobotanists have developed new perspectives on historical herbaria, although their main interest in the use of local plants by Indigenous communities is focused on the present. How many of the plants in a herbarium identified as plants of economic relevance can still be found in a region today? How many of them are still used there for the same purpose? And are the Indigenous names listed in historical herbaria still in use? ⁴ Tinde van Andel and her collaborators have looked at these questions in relation to several herbaria, including one out of a total of four that were put together by the German botanist Paul Hermann (1646–95) during his stay in Ceylon (today Sri Lanka) in the 1670s. ⁵ Two other Hermann herbaria will be the focus of attention here, but from a different perspective.

The origins of ethnobotany go back to the observations made by early modern missionaries, merchants, traveling scholars, botanists, and others on their journeys, whether in the context of expeditions financed and organized by the state, on private, individual journeys, or on travels in the service of trading companies such as the Dutch East India Company (VOC), the British East India Company (EIC), and others. ⁶ With Paul Hermann, the emphasis here will be on a member of the third group, whose presence in Asia was based on the global infrastructure of a trading company, in this case the VOC. ⁷ They traveled on the VOC’s ships, lived in its settlements, and were employed as merchants, preachers, medical doctors, or administrative staff. During their long periods of service abroad, some of them not only collected plants but also amassed ethnobotanical and linguistic information about their uses and names. This often went far beyond what they were expected to provide to their employers in order to facilitate the exploitation of biological resources in the context of a competitive plant capitalism. ⁸ Their herbaria document comprehensive ethnobotanical and linguistic investigations, as well as the language skills required for both. Here these herbaria will be investigated as a medium that was used to register, organize, and update this information for use in later publications.

To do so, I draw inspiration from recent approaches developed by historians of technology that conceptualize historical objects as remnants of the practices, gestures, and skills required to produce and use them. This framework allows for the use of an object’s material properties as sources for an inquiry into the social, cultural, economic, artisanal, or scholarly practices of which the object had originally been a part. Gianenrico Bernasconi developed this approach into what he called an archaeology of practices (archéologie des pratiques) and investigated, among other objects, a watch with a second hand from the late eighteenth century to gain insights into its original use. ⁹ I will apply some of these tools to two of Hermann’s herbaria that were annotated further by several botanists throughout the first half of the eighteenth century. ¹⁰

First, this article will show that herbaria and the handwritten notes they contain provide a wealth of information on the linguistic skills and interests of those who collected plants and information about their uses in an overseas trading settlement (in this case Sri Lanka). Hermann’s botanical practice demanded and, at the same time, generated knowledge of Sinhalese (an Indo-Aryan language that is spoken by the largest ethnic group on the island) and its script. His handwritten notes not only reveal his basic understanding of this language but also a philological interest going beyond the purely utilitarian. His herbarium documents a wealth of information on the semantics, morphology, and pronunciation of Sinhalese that is intertwined with his botanical observations. Second, on the basis of the voluminous notes in the two herbaria, the character of early modern herbaria as manuscripts will be emphasized. This is an essential quality that has so far been largely overshadowed by interest in the dried plants they contain. And third, Hermann’s herbaria will be integrated into an investigation of scribal practices and publication methods of eighteenth-century botany. ¹¹ Along with field notes, letters, manuscripts, illustrations, and printed books, herbaria were knots in the textual–visual mesh of early modern botany.

Foreign language skills, multilingualism, and field linguistics in the herbarium

Paul Hermann was born in Halle an der Saale (Saxony-Anhalt) in 1646. He studied medicine in Leipzig and Padua, where he gained a degree in 1670. ¹² In 1671, he continued his studies in Leiden, attending the botany lectures given there by Arnold Syen, director of the Botanical Gardens. Via Syen, Hermann made the acquaintance of Hieronymus van Beverningh (or Beverningk), a Dutch diplomat and plant lover, through whose good offices he was employed as a doctor in Ceylon (today Sri Lanka) by the VOC. ¹³ From 1672 to 1680, Hermann headed the Dutch hospital in Colombo. When Syen died in 1678, Hermann was appointed his successor and returned to Leiden in 1680. Hermann died in 1695 at the age of forty-eight. At this point, his Ceylon material had not yet been published. ¹⁴

We know of four herbaria that Hermann created during his stay in Sri Lanka: the largest comprises five volumes – four with dried plants, and one with drawings – that is today held by the Natural History Museum in London (hereafter London Herbarium, LH). For a long time its whereabouts were a mystery until, by chance, it fell into Linnaeus’s hands. He identified it as Hermann’s personal herbarium and published his Flora Zeylanica (1747) based on it. ¹⁵ The second – a single volume containing only dried plants and no illustrations – is today held by the library of the Institut de France in Paris (hereafter Paris Herbarium, PH). It had been in the possession of the Dutch botanist Johannes Burman (1706–79) and provided the basis of his Thesaurus Zeylanicus (1737). ¹⁶ A third herbarium, in two volumes, is held by the Naturalis Biodiversity Center in Leiden (Netherlands). ¹⁷ Hermann had given it as a present to Hieronymus Beverningh, who had facilitated his stay in Ceylon. A fourth herbarium was in the papers left by the Breyne family of botanists from Danzig and is today held by the Forschunghsbibliothek Gotha (Thuringia). ¹⁸

Not all early modern herbaria were annotated. Some have only sparse comments, while others – including the two that will occupy center stage here – were densely annotated. What is immediately obvious on leafing through the Paris Herbarium is how many handwritten notes there are per folio. ¹⁹ Hermann placed his notes in close proximity to the affixed plants, either right next to or directly below them. It is also obvious that some folios contain notes written in up to three different hands. I shall turn first to the successive layers of this cross-generational, multilingual annotation process and to the authors involved.

Hermann’s meticulous, formal handwriting stands out from the annotations that were made by the later owners of his herbaria. ²⁰ His notes, largely in Latin, contain information about the name of the plant and, where known, references to its use, in particular as fodder, food, a poison, or as a pigment for dyeing textiles. In some cases, there are also references to authors who had already described a particular plant before him. If one looks at the large, handwritten text block on the right lower half of folio 5 of the Paris Herbarium, lines four to seven are in Hermann’s handwriting, framed above and below by Latin notes in a second hand, which will be discussed in the section “The herbarium as a record of botanical writing and reading practices.” Hermann’s entry consists of a long, descriptive name for the affixed plant, “Balsamina seu Noli me tangere Zeylanicum flore rubente fructu hirudinis facie,” followed by Kudalukola, the Sinhalese name of the plant, noted in a Latin transcription as well as in the Sinhalese script. ²¹ Numerous examples of this sort can be found on other folios of this herbarium. ²² Sometimes, Hermann also noted the pronunciation of the Sinhalese name, for example, in the entry on a plant which he calls the Ceylonese Ratabala (Ratabala Ceylonensium): “Ratabala is pronounced . . . Ratámbala.” ²³ This is followed by a brief explanation of the morphology and meaning of the name: “Ratabala . . . means red bala.” ²⁴ Similar information is also found in Hermann’s London Herbarium, where for almost every plant its Sinhalese name is noted. Even more frequently than in his Paris Herbarium, Hermann’s entries in the London Herbarium contain a commentary on the morphology and semantics of the names. For one plant, for example, he explains that its name derives from the fact that its flower resembles an elephant’s trunk; ²⁵ the name of another plant is traced back to a local insect. ²⁶ Hermann clearly had a basic knowledge of the Sinhalese language. ²⁷

How did he acquire it? Plant names in various Asian as well as South and Central American languages are found in a number of botanical publications from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The most spectacular is the Hortus Malabaricus (Amsterdam, 1678–93), an illustrated work in twelve volumes on the flora of the west Indian coast along the Western Ghats, compiled by local scholars, commissioned by the governor of Dutch Malabar, Hendrik Adriaan van Rheede (also Reede) tot Drakenstein (1636–91). ²⁸ The illustrations in the Hortus Malabaricus are labeled with the names of the plants in up to four languages in the relevant scripts – in Malayalam, Konkani, “Arabic,” and Latin. ²⁹ People who were knowledgeable about local plants had written down their names and detailed information about their mostly medicinal use in their own mother tongues. These were subsequently translated into Portuguese and, finally, into Latin. ³⁰

While the multilingualism of the Hortus Malabaricus did not result from the Dutchman Rheede’s mastery of South Indian languages, the Dutch missionary and travel writer Philips Balde (also Baelde or Baldaeus; 1632–71), by contrast, is known to have prepared himself in Leiden for a mission to South-East Asia by learning Malay. As this language was spoken in the regions of South-East Asia where the spices traded by the VOC originated, its employees had compiled linguistic information over time that Balde may have used. ³¹ Unexpectedly, however, Balde was sent not to South-East Asia, but to Ceylon, where he found himself having to learn other languages. His description, Wahrhaftige ausführliche Beschreibung der berühmten ost-indischen Kusten Malabar und Coromandel, als auch der Insel Zeylon (Truthful, Detailed Description of the Famous East Indian Coasts of Malabar and Coromandel As Well As of the Island Ceylon; published first in Dutch then in German, 1672), contains an extensive chapter on language. ³² In it, Balde outlined the grammar and script of the Tamil language and reported how he communicated on the spot and learned the language. ³³ For his missionary activity, Balde first worked with an interpreter whose mother tongue was Tamil, and with whom he communicated in Portuguese. ³⁴ At the same time, he started learning the Tamil script along with the local children. ³⁵ The records of the Swedish botanist Daniel Rolander (1723/1725–93), who traveled in Suriname between 1755 and 1756 and collected plants there, suggest that within a few months he had learned the basics of Sranan Tongo, a local creole language. On his collecting expeditions, he was able to make himself understood, to ask for plant names and write them down, and inquire how the locals used them. ³⁶

However Hermann acquired the language – studying handwritten vocabulary lists and grammars put together by Portuguese and Dutch missionaries for their own purposes is another possibility – the entries in his herbaria document that during his stay in Ceylon he was able to understand the Sinhalese language and use the Sinhalese script at an elementary level. ³⁷ Some of the plants listed in the Leiden Herbarium, many plants in the Paris and Gotha herbaria, and practically all of those in the London Herbarium are accompanied by his entries with names in Sinhalese script. As both the shade of the ink and the thickness of the pen strokes are identical in all of his entries, it can be assumed that it was not a secretary or assistant who wrote them, but Hermann himself. These notes in Hermann’s herbaria indicate that while gathering information about local languages was not his main aim, it was an important and integral part of his botanical and medical activities in Ceylon. He and other botanists in comparable situations practiced what, in a different context, Romain Bertrand called “on-the-spot-philology.” ³⁸ Hermann’s basic knowledge of the language allowed him to collect information about the use of plants, to record local plant names in Sinhalese script, and to transliterate them and translate the parts of which these names were composed into Latin, which required a basic understanding of morphology. He also recorded emphasis and pronunciation. In addition, he put together a list of the Sinhalese alphabet (Alphabetum Cingalensium) and compiled a small book of vocabulary (Vocabularium Selanense seu Insulae Ceylon in India Orientali).

After his return to Leiden, Hermann sent the handwritten alphabet and vocabulary book to Thomas Hyde (1636–1703), Professor of Oriental Languages at the University of Oxford. Hyde, an eminent authority on Arabic, Persian, and Hebrew, had also translated the Bible into Malay, compiled a Malay–English dictionary, and collected information on other languages. ³⁹ He regarded the botanist Hermann as an especially reliable informant on the Sinhalese language because of his knowledge of the script. ⁴⁰ Hermann’s botanical-philological explorations thus produced not only information about the plants of Ceylon and their uses, but also material for a philology of South Asian languages, which had been used and put into a provisional order by a botanist on the spot before it reached specialists in European learned institutions. The herbarium thus fulfilled a previously unnoticed function: it was the place where botanical and philological information – not yet separated, so ultimately it was botanical-philological information – was noted and stored for the preparation of, and use in, later publications. ⁴¹

In addition to Sinhalese plant names, Portuguese names frequently appear in Hermann’s entries. On the Ratabala, which has already been mentioned above, we read, for example: “the Portuguese describe its fruits, which are about the size of a cherry, as Pavoninos, because peacocks (in Portuguese: pavão) fed on it.” ⁴² To record information about the flora of Ceylon, therefore, Hermann not only had to learn Sinhalese, but also needed a grasp of Portuguese, which had spread in the region earlier. At the time of Dutch dominance, it was still used as the medium of communication between the Dutch – administrators, VOC factors, missionaries, and scholars – and the local population. ⁴³ Botanical practice in the region was multilingual and required a knowledge not only of South Asian languages but also several European ones.

The updating of the herbaria by the second generation of owners

Hermann died in 1695 without publishing a major work on the flora of Ceylon, as he himself and the botanical community had hoped. One of his herbaria had come into the possession of the Dutch botanist Johannes Burman, who edited a posthumous publication of Hermann’s material under the title of Thesaurus Zeylanicus (1737) based on it. Some time later, a second, considerably larger herbarium fell by chance into the hands of Linnaeus. Burman and Linnaeus each produced a publication on the flora of Ceylon on the basis of the herbarium in their possession, in the course of which they annotated it further. The handwritten notes on the individual pages of the herbaria thus began to expand, and to deviate from each other.

Hermann originally sent the first of the two herbaria today held by the library of the Institut de France (Paris) from Ceylon to the Amsterdam botanist Jan Commelin (1629–92), who bequeathed it to his nephew Caspar Commelin. Via Commelin, the herbarium came into the possession of Johannes Burman, Professor of Botany at the University of Amsterdam. ⁴⁴ Burman often wrote his annotations directly above or below Hermann’s entries – sometimes his notes framed Hermann’s – thus creating long text blocks containing two different hands on many folios. His annotations mainly comprised references to those publications that had listed the respective plants under various names after Hermann’s death.

On the folio of Balsamina mentioned in the first section of this paper (see also Figure 1), for example, Burman noted, directly above Hermann’s entry, “Balsamina latifolia floris . . . longissimo, Burm. Thes. Zeyl. pag 91, tab. 16, fig. j. (Burmann, Thesaurus Zeylanicus, p.91, table 16, illustration j.).” ⁴⁵ Underneath, he referred to Linnaeus’ Flora Zeylanica, published in 1747, where the plant is listed as “Impatiens pedunculis unifloris aggregatis foliis lanceolatis . . .” and where, according to Burman, there is also a description. Underneath, we find “Impatiens cornuta, Lin sp. 1328” – the plant had also been noted in Linnaeus’ Species plantarum (1st edn. 1753). And, obviously added later, as it was written with a different pen and ink, we find a final reference to Burman’s son Niklaas Laurens Burman’s Flora Indica (1768).

Figure 1.

Folio 5 of the Paris Herbarium, “Balsamina seu Noli me tangere Zeylanicum.” ⁴⁷

In his annotations on the entry for a plant named Kamarangha, Burman also refers to relevant publications: Linnaeus’ Flora Zeylanica, “where there is a description”; Burman’s Thesaurus Zeylanicus, “where the rest can be looked up” (presumably referring to synonyms, that is, the names that other authors had given to the plant); Linnaeus’ Species plantarum; and N. L. Burman’s Flora Indica. ⁴⁶ Burman used the individual folios of Hermann’s herbarium as a folios of Hermann’s herbarium as datasets on which he entered all the information on a plant available to him. He kept it up to date over the years, adding references to new, relevant works as they were published.

There are many instances of entries written by a third person in the Paris Herbarium, possibly by Jan Commelin or Arnold Syen, in a hand that is similar in style to Hermann’s. ⁴⁸ A commentary on Kamarangha, for example, describes in detail the powers ascribed to the wood of the plant and the use that was made of it. It was said that if the wood was worn on the body or kept in the bedroom, it could protect against poisoning and sorcery. The entry states that the name was made up of Ka, which meant “something poisoned that had already been swallowed,” and marangha, which meant “to destroy.” ⁴⁹ Philological and ethnobotanical information were intertwined, and both were recorded on the herbarium folio.

The location of the second herbarium, which is today in the holdings of the Natural History Museum in London, was unknown until 1744, when five anonymous volumes containing South Indian plants came into the possession of a Copenhagen apothecary by the name of August Günther. He sent them on to Linnaeus with a request to name the plants they contained. ⁵⁰ Linnaeus identified the material as Hermann’s personal herbarium and, on this basis, he published – ten years after Burman’s Thesaurus Zeylanicus (1737) – a further posthumous edition under the title Flora Zeylanica. Like Burman, Linnaeus also added further information to the herbarium that had come into his possession. As he only had it on loan, sending it back to Günther afterwards, his annotations were sparser than those by Burman, but also refer to botanical publications in which a particular plant had been described and named since Hermann’s death. The most frequent references are to Burman’s Thesaurus Zeylanicus and to Linnaeus’ own Hortus Cliffortianus, published one year later in 1738. As a rule, Linnaeus only added a single title in which information about the plant in question could be looked up. Moreover, he added numbers to the individual plants in the herbarium, which corresponded to the numbering in his Flora Zeylanica. A typical page from the London Herbarium can be seen in Figure 2.

Figure 2.

Folio 47 from the London Herbarium. ⁵¹

Hermann’s original entry starts with the name of the plant in Sinhalese script, followed by the transcription Waelmaendija. He then explains how this plant name is composed: mendija is the name of a type of wood that is hard to break and was used for making bows. Above this, we read in Linnaeus’ small hand: “Grewia corollis obtusis, Roy. Lugd. 476 (Adriaan van Royen, Florae Leydensis prodromus, 1740)”; below it, the number 324. ⁵² This one reference to Adriaan van Royen’s overview of the plants in Leiden’s Botanical Gardens, the most recent relevant publication at that time, indicated where to look up what was already known about this plant. The number 324 refers to the corresponding entry in Linnaeus’ Flora Zeylanica, which lists the plant under a different name (Grewia foliis sublanceolatis) and contains a list of synonyms with van Royen’s Grewia corollis obtusis in first place, followed by further references to van Royen and Linnaeus’ Hortus Cliffortianus (1738). ⁵³ Assigning numbers to the plants allowed Linnaeus to correlate the published description of Grewia with the specimen in the herbarium. ⁵⁴

It has become clear that Hermann’s herbaria should be seen not only as collections of dried plants, but also as botanical manuscripts. In a next step, these annotated herbaria will be integrated into the networked processes of writing, reading, and publishing in early modern botany. Herbaria were inextricably linked with printed botanical literature, not only as a place to keep the plants that were illustrated, described, and identified in a publication, but also as a place to file the information about plants that the owner, or a series of owners, had extracted from the published literature over time. The folios of a herbarium were datasets that – regularly updated and corrected – contained references to the most recent, relevant publications and to the various names under which a plant appeared in them. This meant that working with a herbarium was not limited to considering and examining the plants it contained. Dried plants had to be compared with descriptions and illustrations in the published literature. References to botanical works noted by hand in a herbarium were followed up by those using it. The use of a herbarium, like the study of botanical publications, was a multimedia, comparative practice.

Herbaria were, therefore, often kept in the library of a scholar. Francis Boott’s well-known drawing of Banks’ herbarium in his house in Soho Square, London, show an interior that was specifically designed for this practice. Two of the walls are covered in bookshelves from floor to ceiling, while a third contains timber panels, presumably doors leading to individual sections of a cabinet covering the whole wall. Parallel to the longer of the two walls covered with bookshelves are two much lower shelves – about table height – for large-format folios and folders. One of these has a padded surface on which several large-format books could be opened at the same time, while also leaving space for individual herbarium folios or a bound herbarium to be laid out next to them (see Figure 3).

Figure 3.

Sepia drawing from 1820, commonly attributed to the American physician and botanist Francis Boott, of the herbarium and library belonging to Joseph Banks at his house at Soho Square, London. I am grateful to Jonathan Goodman for letting me know that, based on information obtained from the Natural History Museum London, he now attributes the drawing to the British painter Ralph Lucas.

The herbarium as a record of botanical writing and reading practices

An annotated herbarium was not only viewed but also “read.” The handwritten entries informed the user of where in the botanical literature information on any particular plant could be found. Anyone who followed up some or all of these references – where his own library permitted – could gather together the available knowledge about any particular plant from what was scattered throughout the literature and linked by cross-references. The reader was prompted to compare against each other the descriptions and illustrations, Latin synonyms, Indigenous plant names, information about medicinal and other forms of use, and the linguistic information provided by various authors. Only repeated cycles of this comparative practice made it possible for a botanist to reach their own conclusions about the quality of the illustrations and descriptions, the correctness of the synonyms identified by different authors, and the reliability of the information on pharmaceutical efficacy. Over time, further relevant information was woven into the increasingly dense web of textual and visual information by other members of the botanical community. This process is documented in Hermann’s annotated herbaria.

The handwritten apparatus on the first folio shown in Figure 4 presents the following picture: the first entry, not in Hermann’s hand, but in the not clearly identifiable one mentioned in the section on language skills, contains a descriptive Latin name as well as the corresponding Sinhalese name – transcribed as Nijaghala (which, it is said, was pronounced Nijenghala) – and the information that the root was deadly even in the smallest doses. A note in Burman’s hand, in the bottom lower half of the page, adds a reference to his own Thesaurus Zeylanicus (1737), which lists the same plant under a different name: “Methonica gloriosa foliis capreolatis floribus fimbriatis reflexis, Thes. Zeyl. (Thesaurus Zeylanicus), p. 158, see the rest there [emphasis added].).” ⁵⁵ What is “the rest”? If one follows Burman’s instructions, and opens the Thesaurus Zeylanicus at the specified place, one finds, under the name Methonica gloriosa, a lengthy entry containing about fifteen references to botanical works that list the same plant under different names, and in some cases contain additional information. ⁵⁶ The first reference, for example, points to an illustration and a description of this plant in Paul Hermann’s Hortus Academicus Lugduno-Batavus (Leiden, 1687). ⁵⁷ Anyone who follows this reference will find that Hermann does indeed provide a full-page illustration of the Methonica gloriosa.

Figure 4.

Folio 1 of the Paris Herbarium.

In 1738, one year after the publication of the Thesaurus Zeylanicus, Linnaeus’ Hortus Cliffortianus appeared. His Flora Zeylanica followed in 1747. Burman either owned both books or at least had the opportunity to use them, as on the herbarium folio there is another note in his handwriting, which refers to the relevant entries in both works: “Superba Gloriosa Linn. H Cliff (Hortus Cliffortianus, B.D.) p 121 & Fl Z (Flora Zeylanica, B.D.) p 51 ubi descriptio brevis (where a brief description can be found [emphasis added]).” ⁵⁸ Thus Burman had compared Linnaeus’ works, after their publication, with Hermann’s herbarium, and noted references there. This meant that he and others who used the herbarium after him (such as his son Niklaas Laurens Burman) could be directed from the herbarium folio that features a particular plant both to the relevant pre-Linnaean literature and to Linnaeus’ publications, which assigned the plant a place in his taxonomy. On the other hand, botanists who studied Linnaeus’ Hortus Cliffortianus without any knowledge of the herbarium found a list of synonyms of the Gloriosa there, the first one of which was that in Burman’s Thesaurus Zeylanicus. ⁵⁹ Anyone who then looked up the Thesaurus was referred from there to the web of information and publications on this plant, going back to Hermann’s herbarium.

After his son’s Flora Indica (Leiden / Amsterdam 1768) was published twenty years later, Burman once again checked Hermann’s herbarium against a relevant new publication. The references that he added to the herbarium are written in darker ink and stand out clearly from the rest of the handwritten documentation, indicating that they were added later. ⁶⁰ If one follows up the reference on the herbarium folio of Methonica gloriosa and looks up the relevant place in the Flora Indica, one finds there, going beyond the titles already noted in Linnaeus’ Flora Zeylanica, a reference to Linnaeus’ Species plantarum (1753), which had since been published, and, in addition to Hermann’s name Nienghala, a further Indigenous name (Junghlang). At the end of the entry, ethnobotanical information from Hermann’s herbarium reappears, namely, that the root of the plant was deadly, even in the smallest doses. ⁶¹

Based on Hermann’s herbarium, which had fallen into his possession (the LH), Linnaeus wove similar nets of information that integrated Hermann’s plants into his own taxonomy, while also connecting them with the major publications of pre-Linnaean botany. If we start with the herbarium folio on Alcea Indica, Linnaeus’ handwritten notes lead us to two of his own works: to the Hortus Cliffortianus (1737), where the Alcea Indica is listed under the name Sida foliis cordatis oblongis ferratis, capsulis quinis biscupatis and synonyms are provided; and to the Flora Zeylanica, where the plant is discussed under a slightly modified name, and is briefly described at the end of the entry. ⁶² Linnaeus added: “The history of the plant provided by the very famous Dillenius, is sufficient.” ⁶³ If we follow up the reference to the Hortus Elthamensis (1732), the German botanist Johann Jakob Dillenius’ opus magnum, we find a treatment one and a half pages long. Thus, to avoid repeating what had already been said elsewhere and prevent his own book from becoming excessively lengthy, Linnaeus used cross-references to a detailed and reliable illustration, or to the description of a plant by another botanist whose accuracy he trusted.

Conclusion

More than fifty years after Hermann’s death, David van Royen (1727–99), a nephew of the better-known botanist Adriaan van Royen (1704–79) and his successor as director of the Botanical Gardens in Leiden, set up a number of handwritten indices entitled Indices in Pauli Hermanni Herbaria ceylanica quae sunt in Biblioth. Acad. Lugd. Bat. (Indices to Paul Hermann’s Ceylon herbaria, which are held by the library of Leiden University). Like Burman and Linnaeus before him, he had compared the plants in Hermann’s herbarium with the relevant literature that had been published since. But instead of noting his finds directly on the herbarium folios, he set up separate documents for this purpose. ⁶⁴ The first index correlates the number given to a plant in Hermann’s herbarium with the corresponding number of a plant in Linnaeus’ Flora Zeylanica and with the corresponding name in Linnaeus’ Species plantarum. ⁶⁵ The second index is structured in the same way, but has been supplemented with detailed observations on a plant’s flowers and fruit that van Royen had made in the Leiden Botanical Gardens. ⁶⁶ Thus he not only updated Hermann’s herbarium by references to new botanical literature, but, by comparing the hortus siccus (dried garden, as a herbarium was called then) with a botanical garden, he enriched it with observations on living plants.

Plant names are the subject of two more of van Royen’s indices: the first alphabetically lists the Sinhalese plant names given by Hermann; the second contains the corresponding Latin names. ⁶⁷ The last document in van Royen’s volume is the only one that is dated, to 1757. It is a directory of the words, listed alphabetically with Latin translations, of which Hermann’s Singhalese plant names are composed. ⁶⁸ Added page numbers indicate where the words can be found in Burman’s Thesaurus Zeylanicus; a prefixed letter H indicates that the word is also to be found in the Musaeum Zeylanicum. ⁶⁹

Almost sixty years after Hermann’s death, therefore, botanists were still studying and updating his herbaria and the information they contained. The process of excerpting, annotating, and indexing took place in cycles, and began over and over again, either after the publication of a new, relevant work, such as Johannes Burman’s Thesaurus Zeylanicus, Linnaeus’ Flora Zeylanica and Species plantarum, and Niklaas Laurens Burman’s Flora Indica, or when a botanist had obtained new information from another source, such as David van Royen comparing the dried specimens in Hermann’s herbarium with the living plants in Leiden’s Botanical Gardens. As a rule, these additions were noted on the relevant folio of the herbarium, which gradually filled up with information on a particular plant, or the updating and annotating took place in a separate document, as in the case of van Royen’s Indices. Through these iterative-comparative practices of writing and reading, the botanical community wove descriptions, illustrations, synonyms, Indigenous plant names, and ethnobotanical and linguistic observations from printed books, manuscripts, and herbaria – especially annotated ones – into an ever-growing mesh of textual–visual information.

The mesh of cross-references grew with each new reading of the items it comprised, as this generated additional connections or undid already existing ones by adding further comments. Here, it was shown which role herbaria played as annotated manuscripts in these networked practices of reading, writing, and publishing in eighteenth-century botany. In the process, it also became clear to what extent herbaria could serve as repositories of ethnobotanical and linguistic information about the plants they contained. As in the case of Hermann’s notes on the Sinhalese language, these were often inseparably linked to botanical observations, forming what should be called linguistic–botanical material.

Regarding the interplay between early modern botany and the philology of non-European languages, it is instructive to see that not only Hermann’s botanical observations but also the Sinhalese plant names he compiled, as well as the accompanying notes on the semantics and morphology of the Sinhalese language, were gradually integrated into the fabric of botanical information described in this paper. In 1717, most of the Sinhalese plant names from his herbaria were published in the Musaeum Zeylanicum, and many others appeared in Burman’s Thesaurus Zeylanicus in 1737. References to Hermann’s philological-botanical observations can also be found in contemporaries’ botanical manuscripts, such as the handwritten annotations of the botanist Johann Philipp Breyne (1680–1764) in a copy of the Exoticarum aliarumque minus cognitarum plantarum centuria prima (Gdansk, 1678) of his father Jakob Breyne (1637–97) for a planned but unrealized new edition. Regarding a tree referred to as Arbor Kauki Indorum, Johann Philipp Breyne noted that it was called “Manamal by the Ceylonese, which means eye-flower, dedicated to the eyes according to Hermann’s testimony.” ⁷⁰ How this material was used by those who studied South Asian languages remains to be explored.