Sri Lankan plant specimens

Dr Paul Hermann's Herbarium is one of the earliest and most important collection of Sri Lankan plants. It contains more than 400 species, which were picked, dried and named by the physician Paul Hermann (1646 -1695).

Hermann spent five years in Sri Lanka (then Ceylon) as chief medical officer to the Dutch East Indies Company, which managed the island under Dutch rule. His collection, in five bound volumes, didn't achieve lasting importance until after Hermann's death in 1695.

The volumes seem to have disappeared from sight until 1744, when they reappeared in the possession of the Danish Apothecary-Royal, August Günther. Günther loaned the volumes to Carl Linnaeus, who set about identifying the plant species and placing them in his new sexual classification system. Linnaeus used them as the basis for his book on Ceylon's plants, Flora Zeylanica, published in 1747. You can see Hermann's handwriting under each plant and, beneath that, a reference number written by Linnaeus.

In 1753 Linnaeus published his Species Plantarum, in which he used binomial names for the first time. Most of the Sri Lankan taxa in Systema Natura were from Flora Zeylanica, so Hermann's herbarium is very rich in Linnaean type material.

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