The frontispiece of this number serves to feast our eyes on the daring fecit of Mr. Corner who has now organized the Malaysian Moraceae, a work on which he has spent more than a decade of intensive work, following many years of earlier work in prewar time. Daring because it confronts us with an attempt to make an imaginary picture of the prototype, or archetype, of a family as it emerged from this study. I feel certain that this will stimulate interest in evolutional thinking on the basis of morphology and anatomy combined with geography. Elsewhere in this number Mr. Corner has let himself go on the subject, how this work grew under his hands and became synthesized in his mind; may especially our younger colleagues be instructed and refreshed by it. Work on two other similarly forbiddingly large families has been finished. Prof. Holttum submitted his revision of the treeferns, and this is now actually in print. This again is a very large synthesis and the result of many years of labour by our experienced pteridologist who had to tackle the identity of many hundreds of names and wrestle with specific and generic delimitation on the basis of mostly too scanty material.