XXXVl PEOCEEDINGS OF THE 



understand that the first volume of Boissier's general Flora of the 

 Levant is ready for the press. 



Amongst the regions of which the ilora has hitherto been com- 

 paratively little known, there are certainly none offering more 

 interest than that of tropical Africa, not only from the number 

 of new forms it discloses to us, but from the extraordinary num- 

 ber and diversity of generic types with a very small specific 

 average to each, and from the curious connexions it exhibits on 

 the one hand with the flora of the Eastern archipelago and 

 Ceylon, and on the other with that of tropical America, together 

 with many peculiar types of its own. In my Address of 1862, I 

 mentioned several of the rich collections accumulated in our her- 

 baria ; since that, Dr. Welwitsch has brought over the whole of 

 his own, with a view to their determination and publication ; the 

 remainder of Dr. Kirk's have also been received ; and amongst 

 several additions, the most interesting have been perhaps the 

 plants collected by Speke and Grrant in their celebrated journey 

 through the region of the sources of the Nile. All these have 

 been partially illustrated by detached papers, chiefly in our 

 Transactions and Journal ; and our Grovernment has sanctioned 

 the consolidation of the valuable information thus scattered, or 

 yet to be gleaned from the specimens, in a general Mora of tro- 

 pical Africa. This has been undertaken by Professor Oliver ; and 

 the first volume is, I believe, far advanced. In the mean time, 

 Grerman botanists have, to a certain degree, been working upon 

 the same subject. Several papers on plants of the Upper Nile, 

 by Kotschy, have appeared in the Transactions and Proceed- 

 ings of the Academy of Sciences or of the Botanical Society of 

 Vienna ; and I have heard that a considerable portion of a more 

 general work on the Ethiopian flora has been for some time in 

 print. The herbarium of the Jardin des Plantes at Paris also 

 contains many novelties from the Graboon ; and in the distribution 

 from Kew of the duplicates from our own collectors, a first set 

 has been sent to that establishment, some of which have been, 

 perhaps rather too hastily, published by the writers in the 

 ' Adansonia.' 



The flora of Southern Africa, so remarkably contrasted with 

 that of the tropical regions in the enormous specific diversity it 

 exhibits, as well as in the peculiarly limited geographical range 

 of individual species, would, we had every reason to hope, have 

 been speedily laid before us in a complete shape, in the admirable 

 ' Elora Capensis ' of Harvey and Sonder. Dr. Harvey himself 



