18 INAUGURAL ADDRESS. 
should we not prefer to invite purposely year after year repre- 
sentatives from the older seats of learning to gatherings here, 
as suggested at the last Medical Congress. What a rich store of 
recent professional experiences would be shed out before us, and 
how would we, while offering Australian hospitalities, endeavour 
to reciprocate from what could be obtained from here as scientifi- 
cally novel. But this principle has still another bearing. In 
Java, for instance, pulmonary consumption seems never to become 
cleveloped. More than that, a fortnight’s steamer-voyage can 
bring, at a moderate cost, the phthisic invalid from England to 
Central America, for reaching, not too far inland, any chosen 
elevations with light and pure air of easy respiration. The 
mountain-regions of extra and intra-tropical Australia, as well as 
some of the. elevated inland downs, come likewise eee this 
hygienic scope, especially for sufferers from a home sutliciently near. 
Turning to geography, let here the question be asked, as con- 
cerning us most, how can Australian exploration be advanced ? 
Talent, enthusiasm and experience are available at any moment 
for the purpose. Our first historic century has passed ; will the 
chronologic seculum also close, ere the blanks on the maps are 
tilled up! Tf so, it would be almost a reproach ; and may I be 
allowed to repeat what, in a geographic address, was said some 
few months ago: “ The main work of Australian land- exploration 
devolved on nine travellers only ; now space seems only left for 
one more great explorer, to rank with the nine. Who will be the 
tenth to carry off this last of honors, or will it be divided among 
several less ambitious competitors?’ Well may the eagerness be 
understood, to set the life on winning such a prize ! 
What a contrast, when we reflect that Pytheas reached the 
Shetland Islands, his “Thule,” at the time of Alexander the 
Great ; and yet, that it should require more than two thousand 
years before Socotra became carefully explored, and thereby also 
its unique floral treasures and other natural riches disclosed, this 
having only been accomplished through action of the British 
Association by Professor Bailey Balfour within the last few 
years, though courses of navigation were close to that island 
since grey antiquity, its endemic aloe-plant having been famed 
already to the trading Fheenicians, but remaining through all 
that time for science purposes utterly unknown. 
Manifold attempts have been made, to map out the leading 
features of the vegetation of various countries on series of charts, 
and to treat the stationary fauna similarly; if this was done 
from adequate material for every great region by united efforts 
of those, locally best initiated, then might be constructed com- 
paratively complete zoo- and phyto-geographic atlases for the 
whole globe, and these would unfold at a glance the prominent 
types in a more impressive and instructive manner than any 
other. Co-operation is needed, to accomplish this, and more 
