326 Forestry Quarterly 



dipterocarp forest on the slopes, and mossy forest on the ridges 

 and summit. Up to 1909 there had been listed from this reserve 

 548 tree species; since then, others have been collected and de- 

 termined, still others remain undetermined, and it is very probable 

 that some still remain to be discovered. When we consider that 

 this small area has probably been used as a collecting area more 

 than any other place in the Islands, it becomes plain that it is 

 impossible to make more than vague estimates of what may yet 

 be found in the great, half-explored forests of other regions. 



A word here would not be out of place regarding the methods 

 of collection used by the Bureau of Forestry. For more than ten 

 years, forest officers have collected wood specimens with botanical 

 material. The botanical material is registered in a separate series 

 in the Botanical Section of the Bureau of Science, and each wood 

 specimen is stamped with the number of its corresponding botani- 

 cal material from the same tree. In this way it is possible not 

 only to label each wood specimen correctly according to the botan- 

 ical report furnished by the Bureau of Science in the first place, 

 but also to make future corrections, so that the nomenclature of 

 the wood specimens can keep even pace with progress of botanical 

 knowledge. When, for instance, the Botanical Section of the Bu- 

 reau of Science publishes a complete review of a given family, 

 all the wood specimens of that family in the Bureau of Forestry 

 collections are taken from the shelves, the numbers checked with 

 those cited in the publication and the labels completed or cor- 

 rected. The entire collections of the Bureau of Forestry now 

 comprise the following material: hand specimens (pieces 1 cm. 

 X 10 cm. X 15 cm.) and shelf specimens (small sections of logs 

 showing bark and sapwood), all with botanical material, about 

 6,000 numbers, representing every province in the Archipelago ; 

 hand specimens of trade samples, that is commercial lumber 

 without botanical material, about 2,000 ; museum logs with bo- 

 tanical material, over 400 ; and museum planks (almost all com- 

 mercial), from six inches to four feet wide, over 300. The total 

 number of species represented by this material is over 1500, 

 belonging to more than 100 families. 



As an extreme instance illustrating the magnitude of the task 

 of making a collection of Philippine woods may be cited the case 

 of the genus Eugenia, of the family Myrtaceae. Of this genus 

 the collections of the Bureau of Forestry contain botanically 



