256 reviews. 



Hong-Kong! — all of them military stations rather than colonies, abso- 

 lutely without exports of any kind but sick troops, incapable of feed- 

 ing their own population, and enormously expensive to the mother 

 country. Of the first of these, an excellent Morula, containing 

 about 100 species, has been lately communicated by Dr. Anderson 

 (Acting Director of the Calcutta Botanic Garden) to the Lhmsean 

 {Society, and printed in its Journal. Of the Gibraltar Flora, a very 

 full enumeration, with notes and habitats, was published in 1816 

 by the late Dr. Kelaart, an intelligent surgeon in the army ; and 

 the Hong-Kong Flora is the first to be completed of that series of 

 Colonial Floras published under Government authority, whose rise 

 and progress will be here reviewed. This retrospect is not a very 

 encouraging one, considering the extent, population, wealth, resources 

 and products of England's boasted colonial possessions, the number 

 of Botanic Gardens they support, of Government botanists who have 

 been attached to them, of scientific expeditions that have explored 

 them, and of unpublished collections that have been accumulating 

 from them, in our Herbaria, for upwards of a century. 



It is true that the Botany of several other colonies has been pub- 

 lished, including some of the more important, as that of British 

 North America, 30 years ago, in the " Flora Boreali- Americana," 

 and more recently of Tasmania, New Zealand, and the Falkland 

 Islands, in the " Botany of Sir James Boss' Antarctic Yoyage ;" but 

 these are all of them very expensive, illustrated, quarto works, too 

 cumbrous and costly for the traveller, colonist, or man of science, and 

 too scientific for general use ; moreover they were not projected ex- 

 clusively or primarily for the benefit of the colonies, but were ordered 

 for publication by Government, on the recommendation of the Ad- 

 miralty or Colonial Office, as national contributions to abstract 

 science, and appendages to costly scientific expeditions, whose results, 

 in discoveries and collections, reflected honour on the country that 

 sent them forth. 



In the colonies themselves, the want of suitable Floras, which, like 

 those of Great Britain, should be accessible to all, thoroughly trust- 

 worthy in a scientific point of view, and yet not so exclusively 

 scientific in method and language as to be useful to the professed man 

 of science only, has long been felt ; and has been commented upon by 

 Governors and colonists in official despatches and in various other 

 ways. Nor has the want been less felt in the mother country, whence 

 alone, in the present state of matters, can any information be obtained 

 by the colonist. Hence, owing very much to the incessant demands 

 made on the Director of the National Gardens at Kew, for the 

 names and uses of colonial plants, that officer has been led (as well 

 no doubt for his own sake, as for that of the countries to which the 

 garden and museum at Kew owe so much) warmly to espouse these 

 representations to the Heme Government, and to urge that the first 

 steps should be taken in this country, in which only can anything 

 effectually be done, to provide the colonies with the means of ascer- 



