VALEDICTORY. 
With the retirement of the Director of Gardens the publication 
of the Agricultural Bulletin of the Straits and Federated Malay States 
comes to an end. It was first started in its present form in 1 902. 
Previous to that a Bulletin was issued at irregular intervals, chiefly 
according to facilities in printing. This, called the old series, consist- 
ed of 9 numbers and was printed and financed by the Government. 
The second series, though the first few numbers were printed at the 
Government press, was in no sense a Government publication. 
Small grants were given by the Government of the Straits and F.M.S. 
for which copies of the publication were supplied, and the Planter’s 
Association agreed to grant t,ooo dollars annually, for which series 
of the Bulletin were supplied free to the Planters on their list to the 
value of the grant. It was hoped that a considerable number of 
contributors to its pages would have been forthcoming, but this was 
not the case, so that most of the work was written by the Editor. 
All that is not signed or to which no author’s name is given was 
written by him. That there is a demand for such a Bulletin is shown 
by the continuous and steady increase of subscribers from all parts of 
the world. Most Botanical Gardens and Agricultural stations issue 
a monthly or quarterly Journal or Bulletin, under the auspices and 
with the assistance of the Government, and these, if only records of 
what has been done in the past is being done in the present, are 
extremely useful. Most of the latest facts and theories in Agriculture 
are published in these works, so that by them the Agriculturist is kept 
posted up to date. Of late years a great development in Tropical 
Agriculture has taken place, one has only to look at the agricultural 
publications of thirty years ago to see that the whole standard of this 
work is rising to a higher and higher level, and that the old empiric 
methods of planting and harvesting are long out of date now, scienti- 
fic cultivation having taken its place. The planter in any country 
naturally wants to know the latest tips on the cultivation he is inter- 
ested in, and these are generally published in such Bulletins as this 
one, but in all kinds of languages. There are upwards of 200 publi- 
cations of this kind dealing with tropical cultivations, full series of 
which have been received in the Botanic Gardens, Singapore, for many 
years in exchange for the Bulletin. And one of the uses of a local 
Bulletin is to publish extractions or translations of such articles as 
have a bearing on local Agriculture. No planter could do this him- 
self. He has neither the time nor the funds to obtain and read all 
these works. This is part of the work of a Bulletin. Another 
important point is to call the planter’s attention to dangers appearing 
to his cultivation and to the best remedies for them, thus the first 
records and observations on Termes gestroi, Forties Diplodia, Hymeno- 
choete, Eutype, the Coffee locust, the Coffee Caterpillar, many of the 
