Preface 
)N June 1908 the Governor-General of the Province of Mozambique did me the honour to invite me to join a Scientific 
Expedition which was then being sent by Government to inspect portions of the Province, with a view to assisting the 
development of such resources of these localities as are more or less allied to agriculture. Previous familiarity with the 
forests of other parts of South Africa, and their constitution, rendered such an opportunity to supplement that by a personal 
knowledge of the more tropical forests along the east coast desirable, so I accepted with pleasure, and spent several months 
during the winter visiting the various districts of the Province, in so far as time would allow, and making the forests, the botany, the arbori- 
culture and the horticulture special objects of study. The result, in so far as the forests and forest flora are concerned, is embodied in the 
present work, which beyond my own observations, records previous collections to the extent of allowing it to be a handbook of the forest 
flora based on available data, and indicative of the vast forest wealth of the district. It naturally takes at least a whole years study of every 
portion of a country to supply the data necessary for a full and complete work of this nature, but that being impracticable in the present 
instance, a winters tour has had to do instead, during which the trees were mostly in fruit but few of them in flower, and the few deciduous 
species were more or less leafless ; it would be surprising therefore if omissions have not occurred, or if the information is not in some cases 
incomplete, but since the predominant and most important kinds have yielded material sufficient for identification, I feel satisfied that the 
production of this work, in its present form, serves the purpose intended by Government toward fostering the economic development of the 
Province, and especially of the districts visited, by aiding identification, by indicating qualities and uses, by reducing the vernacular nomen- 
clature into intelligible order, and by showing in what localities and in what species value lies, and the possible means of converting that 
potential value into hard cash. 
In accordance with a desire expressed, that readers should not be diverted from the main features for identification by the interpola- 
tion of full scientific descriptions of organs less essential for that purpose, the descriptions have been purposely made short and pointed, full 
botanical descriptions being in most cases redundant in view of their having already appeared in the “ Flora of Tropical Africa," where 
however the local and economic aspects of my present subject are absent. For synonymy readers are also referred to the same work, 
which is an invaluable aid to every student of African botany, and in which the following collections from Portuguese East Africa have been 
dealt with, viz.:— From the Zambesi, Shire, Rovuma and Lake Nyasa, the collections made by Sir John Kirk, Dr. J. Meller, Dr. Peters and 
Mr. Horace Waller, have been used in all the volumes ; while in all, except the first three volumes, there have also been used collections, 
mostly from Nyasa-land, made by Sir H. H. Johnston, K.C.B. ; Rev. W. P. Johnston, Mr. J. Buchanan, C.M.G.; and Messrs. K. J. 
Cameron, J. T. Last, J. McClounie, L. Scott and Joseph Thompson. 
I hardly require to repeat the warning given in so many forest works that venacular names alone cannot be relied upon for identifi- 
cation, but they are useful aids if taken along with the botanical description. In the districts visited I found the vernacular names sur- 
prisingly constant within a tribe, and every man, woman and child knew that name ; indeed the exact knowledge of the trees and the nature 
of their music were the two outstanding and surprising features in the sometimes very low type of humanity. 
