Editorial

Instead of choosing for this number a frontispiece devoted to new buildings or persons connected with botanical research we have found it fit to draw attention to the important nature preservation in the Malaysian tropics by taking a design picked from a number of posters made by students in Malaya where a great effort towards nature preservation has recently been made by the Malayan Nature Society. Elsewhere in this issue a more full digest is given of a remarkably well-illustrated and good, instructive book issued by this Society to mark its 21st anniversary, a laudible effort to reduce science, welfare of people and land in future, recreation, and due respect of man for what nature achieved through the ages, to the same denominator. In Malaya an earnest effort is going on to propagate this idea with the populace and with the administration in which foresters, biologists, and naturalists have their share, People should be proud of the natural resources and treasures of their country and this sense of noble pride in fauna and flora, rocks and rivers of the environments of their home-country should start with the schools, primary and secondary, and the colleges. This beautiful book, which is sold at a remarkably low price, provides an excellent tool in the hands of teachers. Other measures are the following; appointing reserves, national parks, and recreation lands, appropriately adorned with signs and posters at the entrances of roads and trails in order to instruct the public. Elsewhere in this issue references are found to great destructions of the original vegetation in Borneo, Lawaii, and the Seychelles. May the exemplary effort of Malaya be followed in other tropical countries before it is too late. Botanical exploration in Malaysia is still well proceeding and the important new finds in Borneo and New Guinea show that the Malaysian flora is still a most promising ground for plant hunting, not only in the way of species but also for new genera.