A nineteenth-century orchid census of Burma, reissued in Rangoon

Captain Bartle Grant’s handbook is a compilation. As its title page says, he drew his descriptions from the works of various authorities, so that the orchids recorded in Burma and the Andaman Islands could be found in a single book. It first appeared in 1895, in colonial Burma, and was reissued in Rangoon by Central Press in 1966.

The descriptions keep the names and the classification of their own time, and that is what makes the book useful now. It shows how the orchids of these tropical forests were identified and sorted in the nineteenth century, one step in the long work of cataloguing the plants of the region, and anyone tracing that history, or an old name in it, can read it as it was.

This copy of the 1966 reprint is in tan printed paper covers with a black cloth spine, heavily tanned and soiled, creased and chipped at the edges, with uneven, browned page edges. There is an old note on the front endpaper. The text is usable; it has not been collated.