TOLD BY THE TOMBS
home and friends, and the latter converted to Christianity by his former master, and taken from his own tribe, believed Rajpoots."
A very different type of man to Sir William Jones, Lieut-Colonel Kyd stands out an interesting figure among old Calcutta worthies, and his name should be held in grateful remembrance as the founder of the beautiful Botanic Gardens. When Colonel Kyd, in 1786, first made his proposal to the East India Company to establish a Botanic Garden, he was Military Secretary to Government. Ten years earlier he had visited the then "eastern frontier" the western borders of Assam, and had brought from there young plants of a species of cinnamon which he had found growing wild there. Within the next few years other specimens had been obtained from Bhutan, and still other plants of the true cinnamon from Ceylon. All these plants were "deposited in the Governor-General's garden," the "well-stocked garden " of Warren Hastings' "old house" in Alipore; and there they throve so well, that it was on their successful transplantation to Bengal that Colonel Kyd laid stress, as proving the usefulness and practicability of his scheme. As Ceylon and the profitable cinnamon trade was at that time in the hands of the Dutch, the Board of Directors readily agreed to a
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