COL. GRANT—BOTANY OF THE SPEKE AND GRANT EXPEDITION. 7 
To M’nanagee, the brother of King Rumanika, of Karagweh, and other members of 
this family I am indebted for much information. The natives are more intelligent about 
plants than people give them credit for: they have names for every one of their more 
common trees; and I believe that all those names have a signification applicable to the 
plant. Ав I made a point of gaining this information for the benefit of traders or travel- 
lers, I hope it may be considered of sufficient value to be inserted in the Linnean Trans- 
actions. Since my return from Africa I have sent copies to Dr. Krapf, a great Kisuahili 
scholar, Dr. Kirk, at Zanzibar, to General Rigby and others, with the view of obtaining 
the derivations of the words; but in a language where there are so many different 
dialects, and these so little known, small results have followed: what they are, however, 
I give at the end of these notes. 
I come now to the pleasant duty of offering my thanks to Dr. Hooker for having 
allowed the gentlemen at the Kew herbarium to name, classify, and deseribe my plants, 
and to the President and the Council of the Linnean Society for permitting the collection 
to be published in their Transactions. I am fully conscious that without such aid as 
those gentlemen kindly afforded, collectors like myself would lose their labour, and be 
discouraged from further research. 
In 1863, when Captain Speke and I made this collection over to the Royal-Garden 
herbarium, the late Sir William Hooker permitted Dr. J. Thomson to name it, with a 
view to the list appearing in Speke’s ‘Journal of the Discovery of the Source of the 
Nile.’ Five years later the first volume of the ‘Tropical Flora of Africa,’ by Professor 
Oliver, appeared; and a copy was forwarded to me through the courtesy of the Depart- 
ment of Public Works. The incident of receiving this work excited a strong desire to 
have a special volume prepared of the “Fauna and Flora collected by the Speke and 
Grant Expedition ;” hence I communicated with my friend Dr. Thomson; and he was 
the first to suggest that the Linnean Society might publish the Flora in their Trans- 
actions. This was far beyond my expectation, but was readily agreed to by the Council 
upon my undertaking to have 100 of the newest or most interesting of the species 
illustrated. 
_ The plates which have thus been lithographed are either new species or such as had 
never been figured abroad or at home, the object being to present what was of the greatest 
interest to the botanist. I trust that the selection will meet with the approval of the 
Members of the Linnean Society; for I have had the good fortune to have the drawings 
on stone made by Mr. W. H. Fitch, from the actual specimens, and he stands alone as 
the able artist of his department. The descriptive part of the first portion (to the end of 
Leguminosæ) has been entirely worked up by Professor Oliver; the succeeding portions 
will be undertaken by him, by Mr. Bentham, and others, who will respectively affix their 
initials to their contributions. To most of the species I have added a few memoranda 
from my note-book, signed with my own initials. 
A map, illustrating our route, appears in the frontispiece. 
J. А. GRANT. 
16th November, 1871. 
7 Park Square West, London, N.W. 
