Page:Cyclopedia of Western Australia, volume 1.pdf/61

But it was not until Robert Brown (the botanist of Flinders' voyage), working up the vast material collected by himself and Banks, began in 1810 to publish a prodromus of the Australian flora that progress worthy of the subject was really attained. Sir Joseph Banks has been called the "Father of Australia," but in a much truer sense Robert Brown was the "Father of Australian Botany." As late as 1830 Brown brought out a supplementary volume to his prodromus, and the first paper published by the Royal Geographical Society is by him, and is a discussion of the botany of the Swan River district of Western Australia. Bauer, who was Brown's draughtsman during Flinders' voyage, and who afterwards remained some years in New South Wales, published in 1813 a volume of illustrations of the Australian flora, and Robert Sweet did a similar work in 1827.

Of Western Australian botany in particular the collection made by Huegel in 1837 was worked out by Endlicher, Fenzl, Bentham, and Schott and the results published in Vienna. The collections which Ludwig Preiss made in Western and Eastern Australia during the years 1844-7 were worked at by different specialists and the results embodied in two volumes edited by Lehman. The botany of Western Australia underwent a critical revision at the hands of Baron von Mueller, who accompanied Gregory's expedition across North Australia and afterwards exhaustively investigated the forest resources of the south-western division of Western Australia on behalf of the Government. His report is beautifully illustrated with a figure of every one of the timber forest trees in that division of the State, and is still a textbook on the subject. The opening up of the Western Australian goldfields rendered accessible to collectors a strip of back country nearly 300 miles wide, and this great increase of new ground tempted Spencer LeM. Moore and Diehls and Pritzel to make special collecting tours in search of new forms or the acquisition of new facts. Government exploring expeditions into the Kimberley division during recent years have also extended our knowledge of Western Australian tropical vegetation. All these later results have not yet been fully worked up, nor are they incorporated in the list published in a special natural history volume of the State issued by the Registrar-General in 1904.

Where so much work has been independently done, and where the results have been published in such a scattered manner, it is difficult and even impossible for Australian students to refer to all the works in which the plants were originally described and figured. In the absence of herbariums and published local floras this is a grave impediment to the student, and the number of species of which good drawings exist is still all too few—probably less than 25 per cent. of the whole. To obtain descriptive characters in a handy compendium is possible by consulting the "Flora Australiensis," a work in seven volumes by George Bentham; but the last volume of this work was published in 1876. The British Government bore the cost of this great publication, Bentham's remuneration being £l5O per volume. Baron von Mueller carried on the labour of recording new discoveries after Bentham, and his "Fragmenta Phytographia Australiæ" is the standard reference work since Bentham's time. Floras have been recently published by all the Eastern Australian States, but as they are not based on one common system of naming and grouping the data contained within their pages help the student of one State's flora very little in comparing it with the floras of other States. For such purposes the "Census" prepared by Baron von Mueller in 1889 is still practically the only single work available. It will therefore be both interesting and helpful to enumerate the chief older works in which the Australian plants were first described and figured, and copies of which are to be found in some of the Public Libraries of the Australian States. Those marked * are in the Perth Public Library.