172 DR. J. D. HOOKER ON THE PLANTS 
Welwitsch in Loanda; of Kirk and Meller during Livingstone's 
Expedition, of Vogel and Petherick in the White Nile region and 
Nubia, of Baikie and Barter in the Niger Valley, of Speke and 
Grant in their arduous journey through Eastern tropical Africa, 
and lastly of Gustav Mann on the shores, islands, and moun- 
tains of the Bight of Benin, are all of great extent, and abound in 
novelty and interest. 
It is with the highest satisfaction that we have lately welcomed 
amongst us the first-named of these adventurous explorers, Dr. 
Welwitsch, who is charged by the King of Portugal with a mis- 
sion to this country for the purpose of preparing his collections 
for publication; and it only remains for us to hope that the 
exertions now being made by Sir W. Hooker to induce the British 
Government to follow the example of His Majesty of Portugal, in 
securing the publication of our own collections, will be successful, 
and that the botanical results of so many expeditions, brought 
together at such great cost and at so great a sacrifice of life, 
may not be doomed to lie unpublished in our museums for 
want of the trifling sum requisite for rendering them available 
to science. 
It is with the collections cf Mr. Mann that I now propose to 
occupy the attention of the Society ; and with but a small portion 
of them ; for the general collection, amounting to several thousand 
species, wouid take many months of continuous labour to investi- 
gate fully and report upon. The whole of these, however, having 
been transmitted to Kew, partly by Earl Russell as Chief Secre- 
tary for Foreign Affairs, under whose auspices Mr. Mann first 
went to Africa, and partly by the Lords of the Admiralty, under 
whom his latter explorations were conducted,—I have felt it to 
be my duty to lay before this Society, with the least possible 
delay, an account of those portions of them which are most 
novel and interesting. These are, the forms of the temperate 
mountain-regions explored. 
In the sixth volume of our Journal, the Society printed a brief 
account of the collections made by Mr. Mann in the upper regions 
of the lofty peak (Clarence Peak) which crowns the Island of 
Fernando Po, which I had the honour of laying before them. The 
very great interest of that Florula rendered it in the highest 
degree desirable that Mr. Mann should completely explore all 
those mountains of the Bight of Biafra, both insular and con- 
tinental, which rise into the temperate region, and especially the 
Cameroons Peaks, which had never been ascended by any Eu- 
