PLANTS OF CENTRAL AUSTRALIA. [66
My friend, Captain Sturt, having placed at my disposal the Collection of Plants formed in his recent Expedition into the Southern Interior of Australia, I am desirous of giving some account of the principal novelties it contains.
The collection consists of about one hundred species, to which might be added, if they could be accurately determined, many other plants, chiefly trees, slightly mentioned in the interesting narrative, which is about to appear, and to which the present account will form an appendix. I may also observe, in reference to the limited number of species, that Captain Sturt and his companion, Mr. Brown, seem to have collected chiefly those plants that appeared to them new or striking, and of such the collection contains a considerable proportion.
In regard too to such forms as appear to constitute genera hitherto undescribed, it greatly exceeds the much more extensive herbarium, collected by Sir Thomas Mitchell in his last expedition, in which the only two plants proposed as in this respect new belong to genera already well established, namely, Delabechia to Brachychiton, and Linschotenia to Dampiera.
In Captain Sturt's collection, I have been obliged, from the incomplete state of the specimens, to omit several species, probably new, from the following account, in which the plants noticed, chiefly new genera and species, are arranged according to the order of families in the Pro- [67 dromus of De Candolle.
