TWELFTH ANNUAL REPORT 



27 



pottery and silk, and of various chemical products from Philip- 

 pine materials. 



32. Natural history specimens. — This Bureau has established 

 and developed the most extensive collection of Philippine birds, 

 plants, insects, snakes, fishes, shells, and marine invertebrates 

 extant. Many of the specimens are very beautiful, and often 

 suggest designs for ornamentation and decoration. Their distri- 

 bution may indicate climatic conditions, the course of storms and 

 ocean currents, or the quality of the soil. 



33. Herharium. — The Bureau of Science is the center of bo- 

 tanical work on the Philippine flora. Its herbarium, which is 

 a great card catalogue of Philippine botany from the standpoint 

 of both systematic and economic botany, possesses the largest 

 collection of Philippine plants extant, about 75,500, while the 

 foreign material, chiefly from the Indo-Malayan region, brings 

 the total collection up to about 119,000 specimens. Additions 

 are being made at the rate of from 12,000 to 15,000 annually. 

 The collection contains specimens of practically all the species of 

 plants definitely known from the Archipelago, including a very 

 large number of types and cotypes ; that is, the actual specimens 

 or duplicates of specimens on which the original descriptions of 

 species were based. 



The collections of the Bureau of Science include not only the 

 flowering plants and ferns, but also the lower groups — mosses, 

 scale mosses, lichens, fungi, and algse. The market value of 

 our present collections is at least ?=30,000, while the scientific 

 value is infinitely greater and cannot be estimated. 



34. Economic hotany. — The subject of economic botany com- 

 prises all our cooperative work of a botanical nature with such 

 bureaus as those of Forestry, Agriculture, and Education; the 

 identification and regional distribution of timber trees and plants 

 of agricultural importance; medicinal plants and investigations 

 of the same; fiber plants; dyes and tans; oil-producing plants; 

 those yielding gums and resins; those used in industrial work; 

 and plant diseases and their control. Data on the constituent 

 species of the Philippine flora, their distribution, occurrence, uses, 

 native names, etc. are compiled in the herbarium of the Bureau 

 of Science. The botanist is able, from an examination of our 

 botanical records, to indicate what plants are already known 

 from the Philippines, where they occur, when they produce 

 flowers and fruits, their properties to a certain degree, their na- 

 tive names, etc. ; and what plants of other tropical countries will 

 probably thrive in the Philippines, and under what conditions 



