LINNEAN SOCIETY OF LONDON. lxxvii 
months of the year, and the thermometer descends not unfrequently 
during the winter to below —30° Reaumur (—36° Fahrenheit). 
The remainder of Asia comprises the two empires of China and 
Japan, which have been hitherto almost a sealed book to our natu- 
ralists. Japan, the flora of which had been partially known by the 
investigations and importations of Siebold, and is now proving a rich 
field for our horticultural collectors, has been the subject of a re- 
markable paper by Dr. Asa Gray, throwing a new light on the geo- 
graphical relations of the floras of America and Asia; and a com- 
plete enumeration of all the species known to be indigenous to the 
Japanese islands, by Mr. Black, originally appended to Hodgson’s 
‘Residence in Nagasaki,’ has been inserted in a revised form in a 
recent number of the Bonplandia. But of the Chinese flora we 
still know nothing, except that of a few points on the coast or of 
the neighbourhood of Pekin explored chiefly by Russian botanists. 
The vegetation of Africa has lately been exciting a great deal 
of interest. When Harvey and Sonder’s Flora Capensis, above 
alluded to, and the French official Flore d’Algérie, now apparently 
at a dead stop, shall have been completed, those two works, with 
A. Richards’s Flora of Abyssinia, Webb’s great work on the Canary 
Islands, and Lowe’s Madeira Flora, of which the second part has 
now appeared, will have given us a fair idea of the principal 
extra-tropical or subtropical regions; but from within the tropics 
little has been done as yet towards publishing the very great addi- 
tions now being made to its known vegetation. The collections of 
the late Mr. Barter, and especially of our present active and enter- 
prising botanical traveller, Mr. G. Mann, have thrown a new light 
on the geographical relations of the Western Flora. Dr. Kirk has 
remitted to us, from the Eastern side, many interesting novelties, 
notwithstanding the loss of an important portion of his collections 
in a whirlpool on the Zambesi; and Dr. Welwitsch’s arduous 
travels in the Mossamede and Angola country would have been fully 
rewarded even had their results been limited to the discovery of the 
Welwitschia, that misshapen mass representing the tree vegetation 
of those sandy coasts, of which specimens were recently laid before 
you, and whose wonderful structure will, I hope, be explained by 
Dr. Hooker in all its scientific bearings in the next part of our 
Transactions. Of all these riches but little has yet been published. 
Dr. Hooker has given us an interesting account of the vegetation of 
Clarence Peak, to be followed, I hope, ere long, by a paper on the 
still more remarkable collection just received from the Cameroon 
Mountains. The first portion of the description of the plants collected 
LINN. PROC.—-VOL, VI. g 
