142 EEV. W. WOOLLS, PH.D.^ F.L.S., ON THE 



prominent man to the systematic elaboration of the Australia 

 Flora. 



Dr. Woolls emphatically expresses what we early explorers had 

 to endure, while often contending- with hostile autochthones, 

 not rarely famishing from want of food, and what is far more 

 terrible, the want of water, especially in desert heat, finding 

 our way by the sextant and compass, during lengthened time 

 sleeping under the canopy of heaven. Few outside of Australia 

 can estimate Allan Cunningham's position as a traveller, though 

 his land-tracks remained not the most extensive among the lines 

 of other land-travellers, especially when the extent of Gregory's 

 expedition away from any settlements for nearly one year and a 

 half is considered ; but such chances as R. Brown and Allan 

 Cunningham could seize on for coast-observations, through grand 

 maritime expeditions, stand unique in the history of sciences, 

 ^lore of Cunningham's than of R. Brovvn's plants found their 

 first public place in the famous suite of volumes of De CandoUe ; 

 and what Professor Lindley and Sir William Hooker, and still more 

 Robei't Brown, have done for the volumes of Sir Thomas Mitchell's 

 and Captain Sturt's great land expeditions is well recognised at 

 home and abroad. 



As Bentham has given at the commencement and at the end of 

 the Flora Attstraliensis a resume of what during the second half 

 of the century had been accomplished for Australian phytologic 

 exploration, and as these records regarding still later times have been 

 supplemented by Mr. F. M. Bailey in an inaugural address at the 

 Royal Society of Queensland, wherein his own important working 

 is also detailed, and passingly in some publications of my own, 

 it seems unnecessary adding to what Dr. Woolls so ably expres.sed 

 in this direction. It may, however, be but right to point out at 

 this stage of the present review, that my own personal researches 

 fall also into the first half of the century, because the writer 

 instituted numerous observations at and near St. Vincent's Gulf 

 already in 1847, went twice to Murray River in 1848, and rode 

 overland from thence in the same year to the boundary of the 

 colony of Victoria, what was at that period almost unsettled 

 country, mainly with the object of determining the range of 

 Tasmanian foi'ms of plants westward. 



From merely such data it is easily understood how one of the 

 largest of the herbaria anywhere in existence arose in Melbourne, 

 especially as were incorporated into it by spontaneous free gift, 

 the writer's own pi*ivate collections, commenced in 1839, and as he 

 acquired also early home collections i-ich in plants typic for species 

 even back into the last century. For autlientic testimony as to 

 localities of growth, display of variability, the Australian division 

 of our Herbarium is the richest in the world, and would 

 under ordinary foresight serve for fundatory information through 

 centuries. But local herbaria have been started in most of i\\Q 



