22 
last ten years accumulated from various parts of the East and 
West Coasts, and from the interior of tropical Africa, especially 
— sent by Baikie, Barter, Mann, Livingstone, Meller, Kirk, 
peke, Grant, and Petherick, &c., &c. These include many 
Lees een of the plants ‘of our West African Colonies ; ; but 
they cannot be published without Government aid, and it is most 
desirable, both for the interest of science and of the Colonies, 
expeditions, conducted at great cost and at a great sacrifice of 
life, should be combined into one lure of Tropical Africa, on 
the plan of the above Colonial Floras, for which a grant of £1,200 
from the Treasury would b e su cient. 
12. Ample materials are preserved at Kew for a Flora of 
British India, towards which extensive preparations have been 
made by Drs. Hooker and Thomson. The first volume of a 
“ Flora Indica” indeed ~~ oe d by these gentlemen in 
1855, at their own cost ; but the Honourable East India pera! 
declining either to quark the authors for their outlay, o 
to encourage them to continue the work, it was errant 
relinquished, 
W. J. HOOKER, 
Director of the Royal Gardens, Kew. 
Royal Gardens, 1863. 
Handbook to Ceylon Flora. 
The following quasi official une anDonee in the Natural 
History Review for 1861 (pp. 260, 
“ An unaided effort to develop a — of the plants of our 
Colonies, is the “ Enumeratio Plantarwm Zeylanie” of My. 
Thwaites, the oe Director of the Peradenia Botanic 
den. On Mr. Thwaites’ appointment to Ceylon, in 1849, he 
found "the want of sity guide to the indigenous plants of .the 
ats a most serious drawback, to himself especially, who had no 
vious knowledge of tropical botany ; moreover, he arrived 
Sas the time when those energetic measures were being adopted 
by the Government and the settlers, which have resulted in Ceylon 
Peed rising to the position of the most prosperous of our 
rn possessions. With the sioattint of Moon’s indescribably 
tai catalogue of Ceylon plants (containing not half the indigenous 
plants, and fully half of these wrongly named) no work on the 
plants of the island had appeared, since the days of ariieaits and 
Linnzus, nor were there any means of studying its Flora, except 
by aid of the expensive and always incomplete Indian Floras, 
or the more voluminous general systemata of all known plants. 
Fortunately, a partially named, but incomplete, Ceylon Herbarium 
had been formed at the Botanic Garden by Mr. Thwaites’ prede- 
cane Moon and Gardner ; this the new Director at once com- 
on them to the Journal of 
ing the first set to the Kew Herbarium, 
and the corresponding names returned to him, After eight years. 
