32 president's address. 



available to Members, so I need not quote from it. Miss Brewster 

 has done an excellent piece of work, and left little, if anything, 

 for others to glean, except to extend her observations to the 

 other species of the genus. 



A little book by Mr. C. Miidd(27) contains a good deal about 

 pollination, some of it very extraordinary, too extraordinary to he 

 taken seriously — as for example the pollination of Dryaiidra !)>■ 

 kangaroos, said to have been observed on the Bine Mountains; and 

 of an orchid by frogs. 



In a paper by E. W. Berry(28), on " The Affinities and Dis- 

 tribution of the Lower Eocene Flora of South-Eastern North 

 America, he gives a list of plants, among which are six Proteads 

 in four genera- Palaeodendron, Proteoides, Knightopliyllum, and 

 f^anksia. He also mentions Banksia and Drvandra as l)ein£r 

 found in abundance in the European Tertiary, and that the 

 family enjoyed a nu)re or less cosmopolitan range in the Early 

 Tertiary. The ani;estors of the family, he thinks, probably 

 entered the Australian Region during the Upper Cretaceous, 

 before the country had become entirely separated from Asia, 

 becoming adapted to the peculiar soils and climate of Australia: 

 while the stock in the Northern Hemisphere appears to have 

 been unable to stand the climatic changes, and thus became 

 extinct. Von Ettingsliausen, in his Memoir, republished by the 

 Department of Mines, Sydney(29), described a number of Pro- 

 teads from the Tertiary of Australia. Incidentally, I would like 

 to place upon record my feeling that it is unsafe to identify plants 

 from mere impressions of their leaves. The more plants I know, 

 the more I find that leaves very similar occur in plants belonging 

 to widely separated families, while, on the other hand, plants 

 belonging to the same family, or even the same genus, may have 

 leaves so utterly dissimilar, that T should hesitate, without having 

 seen flowers or fruits, to tliink thev were allied. The differincr 

 types of leaf in Banksia and Hakea are examples of this. But 

 Mr. Deane expressed similar opinions frcmi this Chair long ago, 

 in mucli more convincing terms. 



The point I wished to draw attention to is this : that the 

 majority of recent Proteads are bird-pollinated, and specially 



