In a blog post for Botanic Stories, Royal Botanic Garden, Edinburgh, Henry Noltie writes:

When the museum and library of the East India Company, following its inheritance by the India Office of the British government, was dispersed in 1879 its fragments were scattered between many institutions. These included the British Museum and the South Kensington Museum. With renamings and further institutional splittings, the fine and applied art collections, the zoological material, and the voluminous manuscript records of the EIC, are now to be found in the V & A, the BM, the Natural History Museum and the British Library. In 1879, and not without considerable acrimony, Kew received all the botanical material – in vast quantities. Among the economic botanical material were 36 tons of wood samples (largely subsequently destroyed), and from the library some 3359 botanical drawings.

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