PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS. 19 



educational work is of the highest type, as it follows on 

 after the ordinary general education is finished. We in 

 Australia hear the echoes of unrest throbbing along the 

 insulated cable that stretches like a bundle of nerves from 

 the mother country, and the messages really mean that 

 there is work for the British Science Guild multiplied a 

 hundred times over to be done, in wakening people out of 

 the delusion that you can improvise when the time of 

 stress and danger comes upon us and that there is no need 

 to take thought beforehand. 



In that singularly charming and beautiful branch of 

 science, botany, I am glad to say Mr. J. H. Maiden, the 

 Government Botanist, has completed a work of Vast mag- 

 nitude, namely the permanent establishment of a National 

 Herbarium, housed, classified and protected from ravaging 

 insects in the same building as the somewhat small and little 

 known botanical museum. Mr. Maiden is engaged on the 

 great work of his life, the critical revision of the genus 

 Eucalyptus ; he has completed his Life of the Father of 

 Australia, Sir Joseph Banks ; and amid his many duties is 

 ever doing the good work of beautifying the City of Sydney, 

 and maintaining and jealously guarding our open spaces, so 

 that generations to come shall not be deprived of their full 

 percentage of oxygen, and still more nobly contending for 

 what — unless cared for in time, will soon become a lost 

 heritage — our forests and our economic timber supply, a 

 responsibility that rests very lightly on the consciences of 

 those immediately concerned in their preservation. Mr. 

 Maiden tells me that there have been added to the National 

 Herbarium during the past year, large numbers of plants in 

 all the sections to which it is divided. Details are given in 

 the Annual Report of the Botanic Gardens. His magnum 

 opus, the "Critical Revision of the genus Eucalyptus," has 

 now reached the tenth part, with 48 plates, completing the 



