REPORT. 
The Honorable Robert Ramsay , tyc., fyc., fyc. 
Melbourne, August 1874. 
Sir, 
In compliance with your communication of the 6th instant, I have now the 
honor of submitting to you a record of the progress of my departmental labors during 
the last financial year. Though like in all former years of my administration, so also 
in this, my time, far beyond the ordinary office hours, allotted to official engagements, 
has been given to the public service, yet with all unabating efforts I have been 
compelled to draw the line of my operations during the last twelve months into far 
more narrow limits than I could have wished for the current requirements and for the 
anticipated necessities of my departmental obligations. Such labors as still coidd be 
carried out may be classed as — 
(1.) The routine work of the office, with its daily calls for information, 
either orally or in correspondence. 
(2.) The phytographic engagements for descriptive works. 
(3.) The industrial researches in connection with indigenous and foreign 
plants. 
(4.) The travels for the continuation of the field-studies, concerning 
the Victorian vegetation. 
(5.) The issue of educational collections. 
In referring successively to these series of engagements I shall consider it mv 
duty to explain also the future requirements of each ; and I shall simultaneously 
place before you statements on those branches of the service w hich, after the temporary 
withdrawal of most of the working votes of the department, and also of nearly all the 
buildings, came to a standstill. I shall do this with all the more freedom as it is 
expected, that in a professional department, of which, in this instance, I am the founder, 
the head of the establishment is to afford to the honorable the Ministerial chief every 
advice ; and inasmuch as my institution was encouraged for many years by 
enlightened legislative approval, I do entertain the hope, that my explanations wall 
lead' to such a reorganization of my department as w ill enable me to do, honorably, 
justice to the branch of public service entrusted to my responsible care. 
The routine work then of the department from the 1st of July 1873 till the 
30th June 1874 consisted of issuing about 2,000 letters, or communications equiva- 
lent to letters, irrespective of such collateral correspondence as may not be strictly 
official, like that on geographic exploration, but which, nevertheless, remains intimately 
connected with my researches on Australian plants, and which largely tends to add to 
our collections and other means of phy to logic study. That the ordinary corre- 
spondence should be so extensive cannot be surprising when it is eonsideied that the 
vegetation merely of Australia consists of about 11,000 species of plants (the 
minutest fungi, Desmidiacese and I)iatomc;e uncounted), that not only on any ot 
these the most varied enquiry arises, but that in like manner information is also 
expected at any time on any extra- Australian plants, numbering already about 
120,000 species (their varieties not even considered). It is also easily understood 
how increasing demand here for information manifests itself on these almost number- 
less indigenous and foreign plants, all of which, in the great household of natuie, 
have their assigned uses, though as yet their value may be largely buried in ob- 
scurity, and can be rendered only more fully known by the progressive strides, of 
science. But, with the augmented calls for information arising in an increasing 
community, enlarged means for extended research and wider diffusion of knowledge 
become needful. It is almost unnecessary to add that, so far as the a rsence of any 
kind of office accommodation admitted of it, daily advice and explanations have been 
afforded^ ^ gec(md category 0 f the service belongs the issue (during the year) of 
the sixth volume of the Flora of Australia , in the elaboration of which I am engaged 
with Mr. Bentham in London, who is the principal author of the work, but whose 
