12 president's address. 



proximo; and, on belialf of the Society, of wishing them a suc- 

 cessful and profitable period of important work. 



In my address last year, T alluded to the many problems for 

 the Australian Held-biologist, and to the fact that the oppor- 

 tunities for research of this kind are every day becoming more 

 restricted. The subject to which I directed attention particu- 

 larly was the pollination of flowers by birds. But the whole 

 question of the pollination-methods of Australian plants affords 

 an opportunity for interesting and valuable field-work. It is 

 remarkable, when the unique character of the endemic flora is 

 considered, how little has been done; and on looking into what 

 has been accomplished, I was impressed with the amount of sup- 

 plementary work whicli still remains to be done in relation to 

 the species examined by authors. In most of the papers on 

 the pollination of Australian flowers, we find that the writers 

 only examine the structure of the flowers, and conjecture what 

 is the method of pollination, with perhaps a guess at the order 

 of insects lil<ely to supply the pollinators. In many instances, 

 no field-work was attempted. Of course, in the case of authors 

 like Darwin, Delpino, Hildebrand, and Henschel, field-observa- 

 tions on the plants in their natural habitats were quite out of the 

 question. But for those of us who worked at the plants in Aus- 

 tralia, there is less excuse. At the same time, workers who 

 have paid some attention to this kind of research, know that, in 

 most cases, it is rare to see native insects, except Lepidoptera, 

 visit flowers. There are exceptions, such as An,(/ophoj'a cordata, 

 and some of the tea-trees, which have very large numbers of 

 visitants. I have found, however, that any of our flowers that 

 have such a large number of visitors, are of a generalised type 

 with large quantities of nectar freely exposed, and available alike 

 to almost any insect. There is no special mechanism for secur- 

 ing cross-pollination. When we examine Knuth's Pollination of 

 Flowers(l), and notice the huge lists of insects recorded as visiting 

 a single species, it is evident that European, and especially 

 Alpine, conditions difi'er very much from ours. One thing is 

 certain, any one desiring to observe the injects at our plants. 



