It would be unrewarding to attempt to summarize the rich sampling of perspectives in tropical botany that has been provided by the five papers in this symposium. Each should be read for what it has to offer in insight and in vistas for future research. In these concluding remarks, I wish instead to offer some thoughts on the general state of tropical research, and to attempt to put them into a global perspective. Judged from statistics about relatively well known groups of animals and plants, there are likely to be about twice as many species of any group in the tropics as in temperate regions. About 1.5 million kinds of organisms have been given names during the first 225 years of our effort to do this, and there are probably at least twice as many that remain to be named. Of these, perhaps two-thirds of the estimated 1.5 million organisms of temperate regions have been named, but no more than one in five of those in the tropics. In 1975, the following estimates of cumulative destruction of tropical forest were made by the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of UNESCO (Sommer, 1976):