PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION 



The pleasure of a walk in the woods and fields is enhanced 

 hundredfold by some little knowledge of the flowers which we 

 meet at every turn. Their names alone serve as a clew to their 

 entire histories, giving us that sense of companionship with our 

 surroundings which is so necessary to the full enjoyment of out- 

 door life. But if we have never studied botany it has been no 

 easy matter to learn these names, for we find that the very people 

 who have always lived among the flowers are often ignorant of 

 even their common titles, and frequently increase our eventual 

 confusion by naming them incorrectly. While it is more than 

 probable that any attempt to attain our end by means of some 

 ^' Key," which positively bristles with technical terms and out- 

 landish titles, has only led us to replace the volume in despair, 

 sighing, with Emerson, that these scholars 



" Love not the flower they pluck, and know it not, 

 And all their botany is Latin names ! " 



So we have ventured to hope that such a book as this will 

 not be altogether unwelcome, and that our readers will find that 

 even a bowing acquaintance with the flowers repays one gen- 

 erously for the effort expended in its achievement. Such an 

 acquaintance serves to transmute the tedium of a railway jour- 

 ney into the excitement of a tour of discovery. It causes the 

 monotony of a drive through an ordinarily uninteresting country 

 to be forgotten in the diversion of noting the wayside flowers, 

 and counting a hundred different species where formerly less 

 than a dozen would have been detected. It invests each boggy 

 meadow and bit of rocky woodland with almost irresistible charm. 



V2n 



