PKEFACE. 



9* 



readiness with whicli Mr. Bennett gives every assistance to tliose wlio 

 come to visit the Botanical Department, and to myself in particular, — 

 but the system now so long pursued by the managing trustees is one 

 which interferes much with the use of those collections wliich, like Her^ 

 baria, are made for the purposes of science, not for the public gaze. It 

 would appear as if the whole object were to accumulate stores, without 

 caring to make them available for use. The rich herbaria collected 

 at the public expense by the late A. Cunningliam in his various expedi- 

 tions under Captain King and others, by the Officers of the * Beagle' un- 

 der Captain Wickham and Captain Stokes, and many others either pre- 

 sented to the Museum or purchased out of the annual grants, have been 

 stored away, many of them from a quarter to half a century, unarranged 

 in their original parcels, without any thought of providing the staff and 

 funds necessary to render them of use to scientific botanists. No sys- 

 tem of separating duplicates for making exchanges hag, I believe, been 

 adopted. And for those who wish to work in the Botanical Department, 

 notwithstanding the readiness of the officers to afford them every assist- 

 ance, the want of a practical botanical library in the department, the 

 regulations preventing the use of any apparatus for heating water, and 



the defective construction of the room as to light, are serious drawbacks. 



"With regard to the late A. Cunningham's plants, however, — a collec- 

 tion second only to R. Brown's in the influence it has had, by its variety 

 and extent, on our knowledge of Australian Botany, — I have, I believe, 

 been able to examine the wliole of them. Besides the nearly complete 

 set deposited in the Hookerian herbarium, Mr. E. Hewakp, to whom 

 Mr. Cuuningliam's private herbarium, containing the set he had resei'ved 

 for himself, had been left, on hearing that I was engaged in the prepa- 

 ration of the present work, most generously presented the whole of hig 

 plants to the Kew herbarium, in order that I might there have the free 



use of them. 



Another herbarium of which I have always had the free use, is that 

 of my friend Dr. Ltndley, who, for the last thirty-five years, has ever 

 been ready to afford me every assistance in my botanical works, I liad 

 already received from him, at the time, nearly complete sets of the 

 plants of the late Sir William MixcnELL's various expeditions; and 

 I have now examined, in Dr. Lindley's own herbarium, the very few 

 types of these or of other Australian plants published by him, which 

 may have been wanting in the Hookerian lierbarium or in my own, now 

 part of the national collection at Kew* 



I have found in the herbarium of the late Sir jA^fES E. Smitu, now 



