

NOTE. 



The analytical tables usually found in descriptive botanical works are 

 partial, and contain only such natural orders as are represented in one 

 country, or even in a limited portion of a very large country like our 

 own. But in these latter days of good traveling facilities few persons 

 need confine their attention to a narrow district. Moreover, the frequent 

 introduction of new plants for cultivation is extending the range of spe- 

 cies that those who stay at home may desire to study. In teaching 

 botany to those who are going to various parts of the world, the writer 

 has felt the need of comprehensive tables which might serve as an index 

 to the whole vegetable kingdom, to the flowerless as well as the flower- 

 ing plants. The want was, in a measure, supplied by printing in 1874, 

 for his own classes, a table based on those contained in Balfour's Class 

 Book of Botany. The form, .however, was changed, since for the stu- 

 dent who, with a plant in hand, seeks to determine its natural order the 

 older form of conspectus is far less convenient than the plan of alterna- 

 tive distinctions arranged in pairs with onward references. Reference 

 figures are simpler and less confusing than asterisks, daggers, and letters, 

 and the method here introduced avoids the needless multiplication of 

 numbers. But as Balfour's tables have, in use, proved too concise and 

 not altogether exact, the whole matter has, with much labor, been revised, 

 enlarged, and recast. A multitude of botanical terms which remain 

 familiar to the specialist cannot be always borne in mind by the ordinary 

 student, and, therefore, technical language has been dispensed with as 

 far as possible, even somewhat at the expense of brevity and precision. 

 Of course, one whose life work has not been in the special line of botany 

 can expect but partial success in going over so extensive a field, and 

 there must needs still remain many defects and perhaps errors. End- 

 licher's Genera Plantarum has proved of great service in the considera- 

 tion of the phanerogamous plants. The table of cryptogamous plants 

 has been made out by taking from various sources what seemed to be the 



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