PREFACE. 



TN the volumes issued by the Victorian Acclimatization Society from 

 *- 1871 to 1878 five contributions have appeared concerning such 

 industrial plants as are available for culture in extra-tropical countries or 

 in high mountain-regions within the tropics. These writings were mainly 

 offered with a view of promoting the introduction and diffusion of the 

 very many kinds of plants which in temperate geographic latitudes 

 may be extensively reared in forests, on fields or pastures. The work 

 thus originated however became accessible merely to the members of 

 the Society, while frequent calls arose for these or some similar data not 

 only throughout the Australian communities, but also abroad. The whole 

 was therefore re -arranged and largely supplemented, first for re-issue in 

 Victoria, and lately also in India, under the auspices of the Central 

 Government at Calcutta ; and the work is now honored by being 

 reprinted, with its present numerous additions, for the use of New South 

 Wales. This new edition has been urged by Charles H. Fawcett, Esq., 

 M.L.A., F.L.S., and received its sanction from the distinguished states- 

 man, to whom the present issue of the work is dedicated. It devolves on 

 me to add, that this re-issue met with the ready concurrence of the 

 Honorable Robert Ramsay, Chief Secretary of Victoria. As stated 

 in the preface to the original essays, they did not claim completeness 

 either as a specific index or as a series of notes on the respective 

 technologic applicability of the plants enumerated. But what these 

 writings perhaps may aspire to is the aim of bringing together, closely 

 arrayed, some condensed data in popular language on all the principal 

 utilitarian plants hitherto known to prosper in extra-tropical zones. 

 Information of this kind is widely scattered through many and often 

 voluminous works in several languages, yet such volumes apply chiefly 

 to countries with a climatic zone far more narrow than that of the 

 colony, for which these pages originally were mostly written. Only some 

 of .the books, which it was desirable to consult, were at my command j 



