186 NOTICES OF BOOKS. 
The publication of this pamphlet was soon followed by the first of the 
two works which stand at the head of this notice. An early and very 
splendid copy was sent by His Majesty the Emperor of Austria to the 
Foreign Office of our country, and by Lord Clarendon, Chief Secretary 
for Foreign Affairs, presented to the Library of the Royal Gardens of 
Kew. This is indeed a charming work, yet, as far as the plates are 
concerned, of unequal execution, as was to be expected if the nature of 
_the process is considered. Few who are fond of plants, and who are 
not artists themselves, but have, at some period or other of their lives, 
taken off impressions of neatly pressed dried plants, and especially of 
leaves, by dabbing them with printer’s ink, which the nerves and other 
prominent parts take up, and transferring all their lines and figures 
upon a piece of paper, as if we were printing from a wood engraving. 
. We possess a folio volume of plants executed in India in this manner, 
and in proportion to the nature of the surface, so is the fidelity, or rather 
the clearness and distinctness, or the reverse, of the plant. If the 
leaves were thin and conspicuously nerved, the form and nervation 
would come off well: but if these sprang from a rather stout woody 
branch, the branch would give a blurred impression, and the portion of 
. . the leaves, prevented from coming in contact with the paper by the pro- 
. jecting surface of the branch, would necessarily give no impression at 
. all; you have only half a leaf, or three-quarters of a leaf, as the case 
. may be; and in regard to the flower, injured as it must be by pressure, 
especially a cluster of flowers, it is hopeless to expect anything intel- 
ligible from the transfer of the inked surface of that to paper. Tt is 
mot capable of giving a clear impression. Now it is the same, or nearly 
the same, in nature printing: only that you print from a cast of your 
specimen, and you consequently fill the impressions with ink (as in a 
-copper-plate); and though your branch or stem may be ¢hicker than 
the leaves (but there is a limit to that), you can print the two by giving 
2 greater quantity of ink to the former; and your stem or branch will 
be prominent in proportion, i. e. raised on the paper, so that its form 
is sensible to the touch. Whatever affords a clear and distinctly marked 
et moderately raised surface on your plant, the same will be trans- 
ferred to the paper :—but so faithful is the transfer, so true to nature 
Gf we may use the term for our dried and compressed plants, which 
have been so often condemned as the opprobrium of nature), that 
wherever there is an indistinctness or confusion of parts, as in the case 
