6 REV. BENEDICT SCORTECHINI, L.L.B., F.L.S. ; 
Bailey’s ‘‘ First Supplement to the Synopsis of the Queensland 
Flora,” in which, it is believed, the Logan and adjacent places 
given as localities for the new or additional species of this lowly 
class of plants therein enumerated are inserted on the authority 
of our lamented friend. 
On 25th February, 1880, he was elected a member of the 
Linnean Society of New South Wales, and in the following year 
a fellow of the Linnean Society of London. 
In the words of the ‘ Australian ”— 
‘Early in 1884 Father Scortechini left Queensland with the Rev. J. E- 
Tennison- Woods for the Straits Settlements, where both were commissioned 
by the Government of that colony to make a scientific examination of the 
country—Father Woods on its geology, and Father Scortechini on its 
botany. When Father Woods had finished his work he visited China, 
Japan, and various islands in the Indian Archipelago. and returned to 
Australia some two months ago. Father Scortechini’s labours were much 
more protracted, and he had only just completed the work. His intentions, 
expressed in a letter toa friend about a year ago, were, after finishing his 
work in the Straits Settlements, first of all to visit India, and then proceed 
to London, with the intention of publishing a work showing the results of 
his botanical studies. As we have seen, his visit to India proved fatal.” 
Whilst in the Straits Settlements Father Scortechini used every 
effort in the prosecution of the task before him ; no difficulties 
of travel were adequate to impede his progress; the reputed in- 
salubrity of particular spots was no barrier to the examination of 
them for the floral wealth for whose existence they were especially 
suitable. 
Whether this plan of writing a book was afterwards abandoned 
or not we do not know, but it is more probable that it gave place 
to a less comprehensive and elaborate memoir, ‘‘ On the Ferns of 
Perak,” a paper which was contributed to the Journal of Botany. 
Concerning this paper Father Scortechini wrote as recently as 
4th August, 1886, from Penang— 
‘‘T have described in it several new ones—z.e., Ferns, Beddome, at Kew, 
and Baker also looked over them. They struck off two of my new ferns 
because they were named at Kew before, although descriptions of them 
were never published. This, it seems to me, is rather a hard rule.”’— 
Letter to F. M. Bailey. 
But he could not be otherwise than enraptured with the pro- 
fusion of the fern world of the districts which he explored, and 
in one of his last letters to this country, referred to in the previous 
foot note, he dwells upon the fact that he must have about 270 
different kinds of ferns from the district of Penang alone, not 
including in his survey more than two geographical degrees. 
