PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS SECTION B. 49 



and that without delay. But even if the recommendations of the 

 Commission are not jjiven effect to, it should not be consistent 

 with our national pride as South Africans to let others do the 

 work and l)e content to reap the benefits. Moreover, even if we 

 are prepared to send the material overseas, the difficulty arises 

 that its constituents may undergo change in transit. Some plants 

 which are injurious when fresh produce no deleterious effects 

 when dried; e.g., feeding experiments have shown that Crota- 

 laria bnrkeana, the cause of stiff-sickness in cattle, produces the 

 disease only when fed in the fresh state. 



The first step is the co-ordination of effort of those who 

 are actively interested in the problem. A considerable amount 

 of work is being done, and has been done, b}- individual effort, 

 but most of it is of an incomplete and unsystematic nature, and 

 naturally so, for the work involves the co-operation of the 

 botanist, the chemist, the medical man, the veterinary surgeon, 

 the farmer and the student of native laws and customs. There 

 are at least tw^enty men in the country whose names could be 

 mentioned in connection with work done in different directions 

 on the question of indigenous plants. For an individual with- 

 I Hit official status the problem of putting into eff'ect some efficient 

 scheme of co-operation involves insuperable difficulties. The 

 necessary correspondence absorbs far too much time, and there 

 is likely, moreover, to be a suspicion that he may want to exploit 

 his collaborators for his own ends. Only a recognised body can 

 properly arrange the distriljution of the work, and be a guarantee 

 that every collaborator gets his due share of the kudos. 



A census of the work already accomplished "and the work 

 still to be done is a comparatively simple matter. Several com- 

 prehensive publications on the subject already exist, which I 

 attach at the end of my paper. I have made a systematic extract 

 of the majority of the stray references distributed through the 

 different agricultural journals of the Provinces of the Union, 

 and through other periodicals. The greater part of the w^ork 

 under this subhead would be the collecting and verifying of 

 hitherto unpublished information. There are hundreds of Dutch 

 and native remedies still unrecorded. The case of native medi- 

 cines in j^articular offers a wide field for the collector. We have 

 a fair amount of knowledge of the herbs used by the Zulus, 

 thanks to the labours of the Rev. A. T. Bryant, and many of 

 the plants used by the natives of the Eastern Province are in- 

 corporated in Andrew Smith's " South African Materia Medica," 

 and the Annual Reports of Dr. Juritz, Senior Government 

 Analyst of the Cape Colony. But nothing has, to my knowledge, 

 been printed about the medicinal herbs used by the natives of 

 Basutoland and of Rhodesia.* 



Evervlx)dy doing research work in this country is sadly 

 handicapped by the lack of reference literature. I have fre- 



* After completing this paper T was informed that some notes on the 

 medicinal plants of Basutoland, by Dr. E. P. Phillips, will shortly be pub- 

 lished in the Annals of the South African Museum. 



