VI PREFACE. 



dently of other considerations, did not admit of so much 

 detail as seemed desirable, and was scarcely adapted 

 to render the Natural System of Botany popular in a 

 country like Great Britain, where it has to contend with 

 a great deal of deeply-rooted prejudice. 



Two principal objects require to be kept in view, in 

 a scientific work intended for common use : in the first 

 place, there must be no sacrifice of science to popularity; 

 but secondly, it is desirable that as much facility be 

 afforded the student as the nature of the subject will 

 admit. In reconciling these two apparently contradictory 

 conditions lies the difficulty of rendering an arrangement 

 in Natural History which is not merely superficial, gene- 

 rally intelligible. To be understood by the mass of 

 mankind, it must be freed from all unnecessary techni- 

 calities, and must be essentially founded upon such 

 peculiarities as it requires no unusual powers of vision, 

 or of discrimination, to seize and apply : on the other 

 hand, it is found by experience, that unless it depends 

 upon a consideration of every point of structure, however 

 numerous or various, however obscure or difficult of access, 

 it will not answer the end for which all classifications 

 ought to be designed, that of enabling the observer to 

 judge of an unknown fact by a known one, and to deter- 

 mine the mutual relations which one body or being bears 

 to another. 



In attempting to steer a middle course, the Author is 

 by no means satisfied that he shall be found to have 

 attained the end he has proposed to himself. Botany is 

 a most extensive science, involving a hundred thousand 

 gradations of structure, with myriads of minor modifica- 

 tions, and extending over half the organic world ; the 

 anatomical structure of the beings it comprehends is so 

 minute, and their laws of life are so obscure, as to elude 

 the keenest sight and to baffle the subtlest reasoning : so 

 that to render it as easy of attainment as the world, misled 

 by specious fallacies, is apt to believe it to be, is hopeless. 



