ABSTRACT OF PROCEEDINGS. XXIX. 



And now I come to the end of my sad story. My col- 

 leagues whom you appointed to speak on astronomy, on 

 geology and on botany have laid before you their profits, 

 the harvest of a hundred years. Ethnology has only losses 

 to report. Within our recollection the blacks have 

 decreased in number from about seven thousand to scarcely 

 more than one thousand. Children of to-day, perhaps even 

 adults, will live to see the end of the last black man and 

 the last black woman of New South Wales. 



To-day no scientific body or institution in the State has 

 a care for Australian Ethnology and there is not a single 

 scientific student at work on it; indifference and neglect 

 were never worse. The primitive life of these aboriginals, 

 so like that of our own palaeolithic ancestors; their pro- 

 found knowledge of beasts and birds, of herbs and trees ; 

 their complex and efficient social system; their marriage 

 laws and their sign language, all have gone without record, 

 and without regret. 



Australian Botany a Century Ago, by J. H. Maiden, 

 i.s.O., f.r.s. — The central local Australian botanical figure, 

 Allan Cunningham, had been sent to Australia at the 

 instigation of Sir Joseph Banks. He was one of two 

 botanists originally despatched to collect seeds and plants 

 for the Royal Garden at Ke w, and, incidentally, for Royalties 

 and other Botanic Gardens on the continent of Europe. He 

 was trained at Kew, and had had two years successful 

 experience in Brazil. He arrived in Sydney on the 21st 

 December, 1816, and his journal informs us that within two 

 days, he started collecting at Woolloomooloo, then some 

 little distance out of Sydney, and reputed to be an excellent 

 collecting ground. In April of the following year he joined 

 Oxley's Expedition to the Lachlan and Macquarie, and 

 most of his plants are still extant, though only fragments 

 are available in Sydney through the kindness of Kew and 

 the British Museum. 



