PREFACE. 13* 



enabled me, with the assistance of Dr. Hooker's lists and notes, to give 

 that range for every species, as far as can be derived from the Kew 

 herbaria or other reliable sources. This distribution is, however, only 

 stated in a few general terms specially directed to showing the imme- 

 diate relation of the Hongkong Flora to that of other countries. The 

 precise limitation of the area of each species would require far too much 

 labour and detail to come within the scope of the present work. 



For the purpose of obtaining even a general notion of the nature of 

 this geographical relation of our Flora, it was necessary to tabulate 

 the species according to the areas they occupy as far as our present 

 knowledge of them extends, although our information on the subject 

 is as yet far too scanty to give any very satisfactory results. The 

 Flora of the hilly ranges of continental South China, of which Hong- 

 kong is as it were an outlying spur, is almost unknown to us ; that of 

 the country connecting these hills and the Cochin-Chinese coasts with 

 Burmah, Silhet, and Assam, is a complete blank. On the other side, 

 looking to the Philippine Islands, the nearest land connecting Hong- 

 kong with the eastern islands of the Indian Archipelago, although a 

 large number of their species have been described, yet this has been 

 done 'so imperfectly, and piecemeal, as it were, at Manilla, or in different 

 European capitals, with so little critical ■ comparison between the diffe- 

 rent collections or with the general tropical Asiatic Flora, that it is very 

 difficult to obtain any definite notions of their vegetation. We have 

 no serviceable general Flora of the Philippines (for Blanco's species 

 require re-identification), and no one of our herbaria contains probably 

 more than one-half of the plants indigenous to them. 



Such lists, however, as I have been able to prepare of the Hongkong 

 species arranged according to their geographical areas, and of which I 

 give below some numerical results, offer some interesting features. At a 

 first glance one is struck with the very large total amount of species 

 crowded upon so small an island, which all navigators depict as apparently 

 so bleak and bare ; — with the tropical character of the great majority of 

 species, when botanists agree in representing the general aspect (derived 

 from the majority of individuals) to present the features of a much more 

 northern latitude ; — with the large proportion of arborescent and shrubby 

 species, on a rocky mass where the woods are limited to a few ravines or 

 short narrow valleys half-monopolized by cultivation; — and with the 

 very great diversity in the species themselves, the proportion of orders 

 and genera to species, the comparative number of monotypic genera, 

 being far greater in the Hongkong Flora than in that of any other Flora 



