THE SCIENTIFIC EXPLORATION OF THE PENINSULA. ix 



The Cockroaches have been well described and figured by Dr. 

 Hanitsch in our journal lately and I believe the Mosquitos are 

 pretty well known. 



But of the rest of the insect fauna we have only scattered 

 papers and descriptions in journals and other works which are 

 often inaccessible to the local student and in any case entail a lot 

 of work in searching among descriptions of species from all manner 

 of countries to rind the ones recorded from the Malay Peninsula. 



The same state of affairs rules also in nearly all the other 

 groups of invertebrates from centipedes, and spiders to Corals and 

 Marine organisms generally. It would be highly desirable to 

 collect all the notes and descriptions of the various groups 

 applying to the Malay Peninsula, and put them together and 

 publish them in an accessible form so that we might have an idea 

 of what amount of knowledge on these animals had been obtained 

 already and form a base for further work. 



In Botany, at least that of flowering plants and ferns, pro- 

 gress is being made as fast as possible. Before my arrival in the 

 East in 1889, it was proposed by the F. M. S. Government to 

 publish a flora based on the plants collected by Kunstler, Scorte- 

 chini and Wray in Perak, Sir Cecil Clementi-Smith very wisely 

 urged that the flora should not be confined to these collections, 

 which were practically limited to the Perak mountains; but that a 

 flora of the whole of the Malay Peninsula should be taken in hand. 



The work was to be done by Dr. King and Sir Joseph Hooker : 

 the number of plants known or collected in the Peninsula at that 

 date was small; and King arranged to publish a preliminary series 

 of papers known as the Materials for a Flora of the Malay Penin- 

 sula in the Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal. This took 

 many years; and in fact 2 orders Eupliorbiaceae and Urticaceae 

 are not yet published. In the meantime extensive collections were 

 made all over the Peninsula and the work got fuller and fuller as 

 it went on. Sir George King died some years ago and Mr. Gamble, 

 and Major Gage of the Calcutta Gardens continued the Materials, 

 while I did the Monocotyledons and some other orders. I am now 

 engaged in re-writing the whole flora, to be published as soon as 

 may be in book form, condensed and largely revised and added to, 

 so that the public may in a few years, I hope, possess a work in a 

 few volumes so written and illustrated that they will have no diffi- 

 culty in identifying any plants that they may meet with. The work 

 will take some time as there are known between 8,000 and 9,000 

 species ; and all that have been already described will have to be 

 checked over and carefully re-examined. However the greater part 

 of the Polypetalae and Monocotyledons are already finished, and I 

 hope in a few years to complete the work. 



The Cellular plants, — Mosses, Lichens, Fungi and Algae, have 

 not been entirely neglected ; but such as have been described have 

 been published in scattered papers in various journals; and there 



