PRESIDENT'S ADDRESS. 3 



tunity of gratefully acknowledging the many valuable additions 

 my Herbarium has received through his munificent liberality, which 

 many other botanists have equally shared with me. An attack of 

 paralysis, of which he had a premonitory warning about two years 

 before, terminated his valuable life on the 1st day of March last. 



Little is known of nations whose very names are lost in the 

 oblivion of the past, and which have left no history, and passed 

 through the stages of conquest and decay. The histories of some, 

 however, crop up occasionally from unexpected sources, showing 

 their extent and importance in very remote times. Of these the 

 Minsean kingdom is one. A Minsean language has been long 

 known in connection with the ritual of the Sabean worship, but of 

 a Minsean kingdom there had been no record before the discovery of 

 some rock inscriptions in Arabia, which tell us of a country supposed 

 to be little more than a desert of sand and rock, which, now inhabited 

 by wandering nomads, and without a history up to the time of 

 Mahomet, had been a centre of civilisation in remote ages, a land 

 of trade and commerce, and which once exercised an important 

 influence in the civilised parts of the ancient East, possessing an 

 alphabetical system of writing, earlier, perhaps, than that which 

 is known as the Phoenician alphabet. The Minsean kingdom 

 reached from the south of Nubia to the frontiers of Egypt and 

 Palestine. It preceded the kingdom of Sheba, which geographically 

 covered the same area, and was flourishing when Tiglath-pileser 

 ruled in Assyria in the eight century B.C. The Queen of Sheba's 

 visit to Solomon carries it back to a still earlier date. The Sabaean 

 kingdom superseded the Minsean kingdom ten centuries before the 

 Christian era. We are new acquainted with the names of 33 

 Minsean kings, three of whom have been found by Professor Max 

 Miiller on inscriptions in the neighbourhood of Terma, the " Tema" 

 of the Old Testament, in North Arabia. An interesting inscription 

 has been found engraved on a rock in Southern Arabia in connection 

 with a Avar between the rulers of the South and the rulers of the 

 land of Madai and Egypt in the north. The authors of the 

 inscription state that they were under the Minsean kingdom, and 



