xviii President's Address 



our often odd-leaved and profuse flowering multitudinous 

 kinds of acacias are always greeted with delight when 

 bursting into bloom, while in Britain and elsewhere far 

 north the snow-decked vegetation produces, beyond the 

 hazel blossoms, hardly any flowers. 



'' One portion of the Key to the System of Victorian 

 Plants, announced last year, appeared some months ago; it 

 gives the systematic index, with geographic annotations, of 

 the (about) 1850 vascular plants known as indigenous to this 

 colony ; it is illustrated by more than 200 woodcuts, repre- 

 sentative of the orders and sub-orders into which our native 

 vegetation is classed. The completing portion of this work 

 has been for some time under elaboration, and will ere long 

 be brought out, though it needs consummate care to seize on 

 binary characteristics, patent at a glance in the field, for 

 evolving them in the desired dichotomous manner without 

 much disruption of affinity in the enumeration, and thus 

 without likelihood of leading astray in the search of the 

 ordinal, generic, and specific position of a plant; the diffi- 

 culty being increased by the necessity of framing such 

 characteristics as will cover multifarious variability, and 

 apply in reference to ordinal and generic groups, and also to 

 any specific forms beyond Victoria, free nature disdaining 

 any arbitrary system into which we may endeavour to 

 ennarrow her. The sixth edition in the English language of 

 the volume on Select Plants for Industrial Culture and 

 Naturalisation appeared early this year, brought up to the 

 knowledge of the present day. To some extent it was 

 destined as a departmental literary contribution towards the 

 London Exhibition, but still more so to satisfy a just demand 

 of our striving and toilsome rural population, whose scope 

 for cultural and pastoral pursuits, on which so largely the 

 welfare of the country depends, being in our own almost 

 winterless clime so much wider than in the colder zone of 

 the home countries of the earlier colonists. So great has 

 been the demand for this plain and unpretentious, but at 

 the same time sufficiently ample and quite inexpensive 



