lxxx PROCEEDINGS OF THE 
well-known port cannot be of much interest except to the collectors 
themselves. Take, for instance, the great United States Exploring 
Expedition under Captain Wilkes. Rich collections were made in 
the two comparatively little-known groups of the Sandwich and the 
Fiji Islands, both of them remarkable for the peculiarities of their 
vegetation, and complete Floras of these groups, such as the distin- 
guished botanist entrusted with the Botany of the Expedition would 
have drawn up, had his advice been followed, would have been import- 
ant contributions to science. In lieu of this, we have the com- 
mencement of a work far too splendid in typography and illustration 
to be within reach of many botanists, never likely to be finished, 
and in which a large space of the text is occupied by an enumeration 
of some of the commonest plants picked up at Rio Janeiro, Port 
Jackson, the Cape of Good Hope, and other well-known ports. 
Professor Gray’s short memoir above mentioned, on the Botany of 
Japan, one of the results of a subsequent expedition under Captain 
Ringgold, has contributed far more to the advancement of science 
than the pretentious volume insisted on by Captain Wilkes. Again, 
the Botany of Prince Waldemar’s Journey in the Himalaya, by the 
late Dr. Klotzsch and Dr. Garcke, which has just appeared, is an 
instance of a costly work of little use beyond showing off the her- 
borizations made under princely auspices. The number of species 
collected is very small compared with the rich stores from the same 
country long since distributed among the principal herbaria of 
Europe, and full half of what are given as new are identical with or 
slight varieties of well-known plants. On the other hand, we may 
well be proud of the results of our own Antarctic Expedition in the 
three splendid and complete Floras of Dr. Hooker, treated in the 
manner most conducive to the progress of science, without any 
attempt to give prominence to the author’s own labours. It is to 
be hoped that such Faunas and Floras of places specially visited, 
such as the Nicobar Islands, will form a prominent feature in the 
forthcoming Zoologies and Botany of the Austrian Novara Expedition. — 
The details into which I have been led, with reference to my own 
special subject of Systematic and Descriptive Botany, leave me no 
time to advert to recent works on Physiology, which, taken in 
its largest sense, is that important part of the study of nature for 
which systems and descriptions are but the means. There is, how- 
ever, one branch, that which I have above termed Biology, upon 
which I should wish to say a few words, in order to call the atten- 
_ tion of our Fellows resident in the country to a field of inquiry com- 
paratively untrodden, and upon which any series of carefully con- 
ee 
