PALEAGE 
IN preparing for the use of students of materia medica this systematic 
account of Medicinal Plants in the order of their botanical classification, the 
Publishers desire to call attention to its important features, and explanation of 
arrangement, which they believe will show it to be one of the best works of 
the kind ever prepared, and offered for the use and benefit of the profession. 
The work occupied over five years of continuous labor, in addition to many 
years of preparatory work, on the part of the careful and talented author, 
who besides being a physician, is well known as an accomplished botanist, and 
artist, and the fact that the coloring and drawings are by his own hand is a 
sufficient guarantee of their accuracy. 
The study of botany for medical remedies, or any other purpose, wzthout 
colored plates would be like the study of osteology without bones, or the study 
of geography without maps. However comprehensive or practical a text-book 
may be, its verbal description cannot compare in value with a sight of the 
thing described, or what is next best, its faithful representation. 
The following are some of the features and arrangement referred to, viz.: 
1°, The 180 beautifully coLorED FULL-PAGE plates, embodying over 1000 minor 
drawings, illustrating the root, stem, leaves, calyx, flower, corolla, stamen, 
filament, anther, ovary, fruit, seed, etc., are all made to a mechanical 
scale, and drawn from the plants as they stood in the soil, by the author, 
the coloring is ~atura/, without regard to artistic beauty or pleasing 
fancy, executed from fresh living individual plants, selected with especial 
reference to typical features, propitious soil, and natural localities, in 
which he was aided, by po wiamee botanists. 
2°. The plants are culeiped in the work in their NATURAL ORDER, given 
in prominent type, and under the first plant of each order the order 
itself being described, and the properties of most of the medicinal 
plants of other countries of the world coming under such order men- 
moned, Bares giving information ze over ONE oo Meprcwat ee 
3°. Then plows the ‘Tere, —should the order a large one, to give a cor- a 
‘rect idea of its place. 
ae Then the Cac is mentioned in black-faced type, oi foot-notes, show: oe 
mee ae wherever peg the derivation of the name. 7 
