110 REV. W. WOOLLS^ I'UA)., V.Ij.H., ON THE 



to render him that assistance Avhich was necessary for the 

 furtherance of his pursuits and the deveh^pment of AustraHa's 

 resources. Nor was he more fortunate in the valuable speci- 

 mens forwarded to England, many of which were not utilised 

 until the publication of the Flora AustraUensis. Mr. Bentham 

 in alluding to the matter remarks, "the rich herbarium collected 

 at the public expense by the late A. Cunningham in his various 

 expeditions were stowed away, many of them for a quarter 

 to half a century, unarranged in their original parcels, with- 

 out any thought of providing the staff and funds necessary 

 to render tlieni of use to scientific botanists." When at 

 length these collections Avere examined, they were found 

 to be of the greatest importance in the preparation of the 

 Flo7-a, and Mr. Bentham acknowledged that, in their variety 

 and extent, they were second only to those of Robert Brown. 

 Cunningham's health had been impaired by his zeal in col- 

 lecting, especially in tropical climates where the thermometer 

 ranged from 105° to 115° in the shade, and although by 

 visiting New Zealand and parts of the Australian continent 

 in search of new plants he seemed for awhile to regain 

 somewhat of his former energy, his health gradually dechned, 

 and when I saw him about a year before his death he 

 appeared to have become prematurely old. Pie died in 

 Sydney in 1839 at the age of 48, nearly twenty years before 

 his great predecessor R. Brown who had attained the 

 advanced age of 8(5. With the death of Cunningham, the 

 first period of botanical discovery in Australia may be said 

 to have closed, and for many years, notwithstanding the 

 voyages of navigators and the expeditions of explorers, 

 little was done to place on any connected record the 

 valuable information which they had acquired respecting 

 Austrahan plants, or to arrange them in any systematic 

 form. Such plants were described in appendices to voyages 

 and travels Jiot accessible to the general public, or noticed 

 only in papers read before learned societies, so that the 

 greatest uncertainty prevailed as to the number and dis- 

 tribution of species. Thus Brown's great work of 1810 (with 

 his subsequent additions) remained the only rehable standard 

 of Australian botany. 



The arrival of Ferdinand von Mueller in Australia 

 formed a new era in the history of its flora, and the present 

 advancement of systematic botany in the Australian colonies 

 must be attributed principally to his exertions and to those 

 of tlie numerous amateurs and collectors whom he in- 



