Species Marsdenia sylvestris

For William Marsden (1754–1836), Irish-born British traveller, Orientalist, numismatist and antiquarian who worked for the British East India Company in Sumatra for eight years. Later, he became first secretary of the Admiralty. He was one of the founders of the Royal Asiatic Society and the first Englishman to study and learn Malayan, publishing a grammar and a dictionary of the Malay language in 1812. He also translated the Travels of Marco Polo (1818). His History of Sumatra (1784) was the first serious Englishlanguage attempt to fully describe that great island just off the coast of the Malayan peninsula. As an antiquarian, he had a matchless collection of printed Bibles from all over the world. He was a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1783.