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Agricultural report from New Guinea about some varieties of 
Yam and Keladi which were recommended as vegetables. The 
popular names of these plants were quite unknown to me but I 
* could hardly believe that we had not got the same plants, or 
some very like them, in Malaya, especially as Mr. Burkill, a 
former Director of the Singapore Botanical Gardens, had made an 
extensive study of tropical Yams and had colie cted together 
living plants of a great many varieties, the better of which 
■*- * 
have since been distributed over the country. Nevertheless, 
to satisfy my curiosity, I asked the Director of Agriculture 
at Rabaul in New Guinea to send me some tubers that we may grow 
in the Botanical Gardens, for comparison. 
# 
The further afield we go in the study of plaits, the 
more uncertain do we become of their identity because of their 
different popular names. The conclusion is often reached that 
it is little use employing popular names; and how botanists 
have overcome this difficulty by their system of scientific 
nomenclature. Dr* Furtado told you in his talk a fortnight 
ago. But there cannot be a living code of scientific names for 
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reference without a great deal of botanical re&earch and unless 
a large staff of botanists is maintained to interpret and 
pexrpetuate botanical science, such as there is in Soviet Russia 
and the United States. In tropical Asia we are very far from 
the attainments of these countries. The flora has been 
studied by few botanists and its very richness renders it so 
much more complicated than a temperate flora. As a sidelight 
on this difficulty I nay recall the remark of Sir Joseph Hooker, 
who was the Director of the Royal Bctanic Gardens at Kew in 
England and was one of the botanical pioneers in the Himalayas: 
to be capable of studying a tropical flora. Hooker said that 
