PREFACE. 



THE first volumes of this work, published in 1915, 

 were accorded so warm a reception that it has been 

 thought worthwhile issuing a supplementary volume to 

 describe and illustrate plants not included in them, and 

 also other species which grow as the fringe of the 

 plateaus. For it was intended in volume I to consider 

 only the special flora of the true plateaus, a collection of 

 species entirely different from those of the lower slopes 

 and the plains and which may be described as that of 

 tropical highlands. But a rigid selection of those only 

 which were definitely known to me at the time to occur 

 in this limited area led to the exclusion of several which 

 really belong to it, and in addition it seemed worthwhile 

 (abandoning the restriction to a tropical highland flora) 

 to include those ordinarily found by residents on these 

 hills, and especially round Coonoor. In the present 

 volume therefore the area taken has been widened to 

 include the upper levels of the slopes, and at the same 

 time figures are shown of a number of species previously 

 described but not illustrated. Botanically speaking the 

 most important additions and revisions in the first-half 

 of the letterpress are due to the publication within the last 

 three years of the first instalments of a new Flora of the 

 Madras Presidency by G. S. Gamble, F.L.S., late of the 

 Forest Service. This work, so far as anything may be 

 considered authoritative in science, will when completed 

 be the authoritative Flora of this Presidency, and all 

 botanists in South India are indebted to the author for 

 this long-overdue and very necessary revision of our 

 Flowering Plants, and for the careful work that has been 



