X60 The Philippine Journal of Science 1916 
is approximately known, and yet much still remains to be done 
there. The floras of the great islands of Sumatra, Borneo, 
New Guinea, and Celebes, and of the numerous smaller islands 
that make up the Malayan Archipelago, comparatively speaking, 
are little known, yet enough is known to indicate that each 
island has an enormously rich and complex flora, and that each 
island, large and small, has from a small to a high percentage 
of endemism. The Malayan region, from the Peninsula to New 
Guinea, when thoroughly explored botanically, will present one 
of the richest floras, if not the richest flora of any region in 
the world, in families, in genera, and in species. I confidently 
expect that in the spermatophytes and pteridophytes alone the 
flora will be found to exceed 30,000 and will perhaps approxi- 
mate 40,000 species. The Philippines are but a small part of 
the immense area covered by the Malayan Archipelago, yet 
the Philippine flora, when only fairly well known from present 
and future exploration, will certainly exceed 10,000 species of 
spermatophytes and pteridophytes. More than 40 per cent of 
the species already known from the Archipelago are endemic. 
There is no reason to consider that the Philippine flora is richer 
than that of any other part of the great area covered by the 
Malay Archipelago, and even if endemism is considerably lower 
in other islands and groups of islands than in the Philippines, 
some idea may be had of the immense number of species that 
are to be expected in the region extending from the Malay 
Peninsula and Sumatra to New Guinea. 
If by the term botanically well explored we mean botanically 
well known in the sense that most of Europe and the eastern 
part of the United States is known botanically, then no single 
area of any appreciable size in the entire Philippine group, 
and for that matter in the entire Malayan Archipelago, can be 
considered as exhaustively botanized. In the entire Malayan 
region but three comparatively small areas can be considered 
well known botanically, and these are the Island of Singapore, 
that part of Java about Batavia and Buitenzorg, and that part 
of Luzon about Manila. The last, being naturally more familiar 
to me, will be briefly discussed simply to show Avhat still re- 
mains to be done. In preparing my Flora of Manila, 2 an area 
covering approximately 100 square kilometers in the vicinity 
of the city was selected as the limits of the region to be covered. 
In this work 1,007 species are considered, all that were known 
’ .Merrill, E. D., A Flora of Manila (1912) 1-490. 
