The Education Department has also placed at my service a set of the plants collected by Banks and Solander during Cook's first voyage, a transcript of Solander's manuscript descriptions, and a set of impressions from the copper plates prepared by Sir Joseph Banks to illustrate the descriptions. All these were presented to the Government a few years ago by the Trustees of the British Museum, and form a unique and valuable addition to the public collections of the colony.
I am indebted to my friend Mr. D. Petrie, well known for his successful explorations in the Otago District, for the very valuable and important aid afforded by the study of his herbarium, which he has loaned to me in instalments during the progress of this work. It is specially rich in specimens of the rarer alpine plants of Otago, which, as a rule, are very poorly represented in other collections.
The herbarium of the late Mr. Colenso has been lent to me by Mr. H. Hill, one of the trustees under his will. It contains a large amount of material, collected at various times between the years 1840 and 1898, but is to a great extent unarranged and unclassified. Fortunately, however, it includes named specimens of many of the supposed "new species" described by him during the last fifteen years of his life, and has thus enabled me to come to more certain conclusions respecting them than would otherwise have been the case.
The private herbarium of the late Mr. John Buchanan has been forwarded for my inspection by the Council of the Otago University, to which body it was bequeathed. Although but a fragment of the collections he formed during his lifetime, it has been of considerable service, as it includes the types of most of his new species, and the drawings and analyses prepared for his work on the New Zealand grasses.
My friend Dr. Cockayne has supplied me with much valuable information, and a considerable amount of interesting material from the Southern Alps, the Chatham Islands, and other localities explored by him. Many of his specimens have been of particular value, from being specially selected to show the range and trend of variation in some of the more variable species of the flora.
The Right Rev. W. L. Williams, Bishop of Waiapu, has placed me under many obligations by regularly forwarding specimens collected by him in the East Cape and Hawke's Bay districts, and by his invaluable help in compiling the list of Maori plant-names given in the Appendix.
