THE PLANT WORLD 21 



the first time, and many others who have made our acquaintance only 

 during the past year. We may be pardoned for taking the space to out- 

 line for their benefit the general policy which this publication has followed 

 throughout its career. 



The Plant World is a magazine dealing with plants and plant life ; 

 and it is primarily intended for the people. It does not publish descrip- 

 tions of new species nor technical revisions of groups. We believe that 

 contributions intended for the student should be printed in publications 

 which reach the eyes of all students, and which are primarily devoted to 

 original research. 



The public does not care about the means by which a scientific result 

 is attained, except in a general way; but it has a very vital interest in 

 the practical efifects of the achievement and its bearing on economic 

 problems. It is just here that we have aimed to supply a need, and we 

 have been enabled to do so largely through the cooperation of the pro- 

 fessional botanists of America, who have responded generously to our 

 appeals and contributed freely to our columns. We have thus been able 

 to claim absolute reliability for the information which our articles con- 

 tain ; and almost every phase of plant life has been covered, as may be 

 seen by reference to our annual indexes. We wish especially to empha- 

 size the fact that some of our professional contributors have given, in 

 simple and comprehensible language, information which could only be 

 obtained elsewhere from technical publications. 



The articles written by amateur students and nature lovers constitute 

 another class of reading matter, to which we attach special importance, 

 as it appeals, perhaps, more directly to the general public. There the 

 great requisite is not the subject-matter, but the way in which it is 

 handled. Any school girl can write a composition describing a walk in 

 the woods in early spring. It will tell about a shy hepatica peeping up 

 through its winter blanket of brown leaves, the delicate trailing arbutus 

 nestling amid the snowdrift, and the cowslips spreading a golden mantle 

 over the swamp, and a line or so of poetry will be sprinkled like liberal 

 seasoning through every paragraph. There are some writers, like Gibson 

 or Burroughs, who can do this sort of thing artistically and give positive 

 pleasure. But when the average person writes in this style it indicates 

 that he is either deficient in the power to observe the facts of nature or 

 that he is playing to the gallery in an effort to win applause from the 

 constituency that considers a scientific truth or a Latin name something 

 to be shunned like the plague. Our popular magazines are full of this 

 type of article, which we have always attempted to exclude from our 

 pages. On the other hand, he who has the knack of observation will 

 take the same topic and write entertainingly of what he has observed, 

 leaving out the statements of obvious fact. Our last volume contains 



