BOTANY 157 



There are several publications on the individual British colonies. 

 For Nigeria there is a book on the useful trees of the Northern 

 Provinces by Lely (1925) and a forest flora of Southern Nigeria by 

 Kennedy (1936). Holland's Useful Plants of Nigeria (1908 and 1922) 

 is a valuable volume on the economic side. For the Gold Coast, 

 Chipp ( 1 9 1 3 and 1 9 1 4) provided check-lists of forest flora and herbs, 

 and more recently Irvine (1930) has written a valuable reference 

 volume as a result of his work at Achimota. Sierra Leone has a 

 work on forest botany by Lane-Poole (1916).^ Very fine collec- 

 tions have been made by French botanists in their possessions in 

 West Africa. Information regarding the floras, published by A. 

 Chevalier and others, is rather scattered, but it is proposed in the 

 near future to bring it all up to date in a large publication. Work 

 is now in progress in Paris on the forest flora of French Equatorial 

 and West Africa. For the north-eastern region, Chiovenda pub- 

 lished many papers on the flora of Eritrea and Abyssinia, and he 

 has recently issued a work on the flora of Somaliland. For Eritrea 

 there is a treatise in three parts edited by Pirotta, entitled Flora 

 della Colonia Eritrea (i 903-1 908). For the Sudan there is a useful 

 volume published by Broun and Massey in 1929. Recently J. 

 Gillett made an extensive collection in conjunction with the 

 Anglo-Ethiopian Boundary Survey, an account of which will soon 

 be published. 



Some of the above are mere lists without descriptions, or with 

 brief notes only. Workers in Africa, who have not extensive lib- 

 raries for reference, need floras covering wide regions, with simple 

 descriptions of the known species of plants and diagnostic keys for 

 their determination. Regions for which no satisfactory works 

 exist are (i) the eastern tropics, a flora of which has been planned 

 by Kew; (2) the southern tropics, including the Zambesi basin, 

 Nyasaland and the Rhodesias, and (3) the north-east tropics. 



The above account is concerned only with the higher orders of 

 plants. Much less is known in the whole continent concerning the 

 lower plants or Cryptogams. Of these the fungi have probably been 

 most studied. A considerable amount of systematic work on fungi 

 has been done in South Africa, mainly by Dr. E. M. Doidge and 

 by other members of the staff* of the Division of Plant Industry,. 



^ See Chapter vii. 



