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Mountain, wander over the Cape Flats and visit the Karoo, Nama- 
qualand and the East; we fill our gardens with plants, very man 
of which you can see to better advantage in Europe, the States or 
Australia ; our own vegetation which you are discerning enough to 
praise is difficult to grow. The inheritors of one of the most 
remarkable and most beautiful of existing floras, we take so little 
interest in it that we have not yet been at the trouble to bring its 
treasures into cultivation! Such as we do find room for, we grow 
because the enterprise of European horticulturists has made them 
popular and, as a rule, we are content to be ignorant that we have 
but brought them back to their own country. This is surely not in 
harmony with the traditions of South African patriotism! A tard 
recognition of a national duty has given rise to legislation designed 
to protect some of our more attractive and rarer plants from a 
threatened extinction, but we cannot stop here. The public taste 
must be stimulated to a proper appreciation of the esthetic value of 
one of the most striking of the products of the country, and our 
duty as custodians of a unique vegetation—-many of whose con- 
stituents have already disappeared, and others can with difficulty 
be saved—must be realised. These objects have been forwarded 
and to a large extent achieved in other countries by National 
Botanic Gardens, and a similar institution here, with the prestige 
of a Government Department, administered on scientific lines an 
accessible to the public would undoubtedly do much to remove what 
is at present a national reproach as well as a neglect of what might 
be an important commercial asset. Anyone who has seen Kew on 
a summer bank holiday does not need to be told that an institution 
of this kind is a valuable means of education. . . . . 
* Before leaving the subject of the South African indigenous 
vegetation, attention should be drawn to the need for its study from 
an economic standpoint. South Africa, a country of Euphorbias, 
has done no experimental work designed to remove the difficulties 
which have prevented them from acquiring a commercial value as 
rubber plants. Of our native fibre-plants, medicinal, resinous, and 
poison plants, fodder plants, and others, we have very little exact 
knowledge, ere 18 a practically untouched field for the activities 
of a well-organised State department of Botany. 
_ “A collection of plants under cultivation affords opportunities for 
investigating their structure and life conditions. I need hardl 
explain that science has not finished with a plant when it has been 
This department of the work of a Botanic Garden is of the greatest 
scientific importance, and it is 
community to foster it, apart from the possibility of any practical 
results ut may emerge. Research is, or should be, undertaken 
with the single object of discovering truth, regardless of the conse- 
quences. These, however, may at any time assume a practical an 
