for the year 1881. xv 



portant additions to our knowledge of the Australian flora, 

 both recent and fossil, as well as of the uses of many of our 

 vegetable productions. The eleventh volume of the Frag- 

 menta Phytographice Austral-ice has been completed. It is 

 especially interesting, as it concludes with a list of nearly 

 8000 acotyledonous plants of Australia, comprising the 

 algee, mosses, lichens, and fungi, and including those col- 

 lected by Gnnn, Harvey, Bailey, Archer, Drummond, and 

 Preiss. I have referred in a former address to a very im- 

 portant and valuable work upon which our Government 

 botanist has been for some time engaged, namely — Eacalyp- 

 tography — a treatise on the eucalypts of Australia. The 

 plates of 90 different species are already lithographed, and 

 it is expected the text will be through the press before 

 the end of the year. You will be pleased also to hear that 

 his book on Select Plants for Industrial Purposes has 

 lately, by consent of our Government, been re-published in 

 Calcutta, and also in Sydney ; and its value is so fully recog- 

 nised by other countries that it is also in course of trans- 

 lation into German by Dr. Goeze, of Grafswald, and into 

 Portuguese by Viscount Villars, of Oporto. The second 

 decade of the vegetable fossils of the auriferous drifts is 

 nearly completed, and will contain an account of the Spondy- 

 lostrobus, which formed vast pine forests in the pleiocene 

 age in this part of Australia, and, according to our present 

 knowledge, extended into Tasmania and to the south-west 

 part of New South Wales, large stems of which, of enor- 

 mous length and 3 feet in diameter, have been found in 

 pleiocene drifts below the basalt near Ballarat. In this 

 decade Baron von Mueller will trace out and explain the 

 life history of this tree. There yet remain in the interior 

 of Australia, and indeed in its coastal regions, vast fields 

 comparatively unexplored by the botanist, and therefore 

 there is much to be done in this branch of natural science 

 before the hundreds of genera and thousands of species of 

 plants already collected can be rigorously established or their 



