560 TRANSACTIONS OF SECTION K.—PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS, 
Secrion K.—BOTANY. 
Presipent or tue Section.—Professor F. O. Bowmr, D.Sc., F.R.S. 
The President delivered the following Address at Sydney, on Friday, 
August 21 :— 
To preside over the Botanical Section on the occasion of its first Meeting in 
Australia is no slight honour, though it also imposes no small responsibility. 
We Members from Great Britain have a deep sense of the advantage which we 
derive from visiting these distant shores. I am doubtful whether any scientific 
profit we can confer by our coming here can balance that which we receive; while 
over and aboye this is the personal kindliness of the Australian welcome, which 
on behalf of the visitors of this Section from the Old Country I take this oppor- 
tunity of gratefully acknowledging. Of the Members of the British Association, 
those who pursue the Natural Sciences may expect to gain most by their experi- 
ences here; and perhaps it is the Botanists who stand to come off best of all. 
Living as most of us do in a country of old cultivation, the vegetation of which 
has been controlled, transformed, and from the natural floristic point of view 
almost ruined by the hand of man, it is with delight and expectation that we 
visit a land not yet spoilt. To those who study Ecology, that branch of the 
science which regards vegetation collectively as the natural resultant of its 
external circumstances, the antithesis will come home with special strength, and 
the opportunity now before them of seeing Nature in her pristine state will not, 
I am sure, be thrown away. 
I may be allowed here to express to the Australian Members of the Section 
my regret that the Presidency for this occasion should not have fallen to one who 
could with unusual weight and knowledge have addressed them from the 
floristic and geographical point of view. I mean, to Professor Bayley Balfour, 
of Edinburgh, who was actually invited by the Council to preside. He could 
have handled the subject of your rich and peculiar Flora with detailed know- 
ledge; and, with the true Hookerian touch, he would have pictured to you in bold 
outlines its relation to present problems. Failing such equipment, I may at least 
claim to have made some of your rare and peculiar forms the subject of special 
study at intervals spread over thirty years : for it was in 1884 that I was supplied 
with living plants of Phylloglossum by Baron Ferdinand von Miller, while a 
paper to be published this year contains details of a number of Ferns kindly 
sent to me by various collectors from New Zealand. I have been personally 
interested more especially in your rare Pteridophytes, isolated survivals as they 
surely are of very ancient vegetation. I propose to indicate later in this Address 
some points of interest which they present. But first I shall offer some more 
general remarks on the history of the investigation of the Australian Flora, as 
a reminder of the recent death of Sir Joseph Hooker, whose work helped so 
greatly to promote a philosophical knowledge of the Flora of this quarter of the 
clobe. 
< Few, if any, of the large areas of the Earth’s surface have developed their 
coat of vegetation under such interesting conditions as that which bears the 
Australasian Flora. In its comparative isolation, and in its freedom from the 
disturbing influence of man, it may be held as unique. We may picture to our- 
selves the field as having been open to evolutionary tendencies, unusually free 
