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be understood without a more complete acquaintance with 

 trifling, vague, and sometimes theoretical characters, than he 

 has himself been able to attain, or than can ever be expected 

 from the mere amateur. . . . The species are limited accord- 

 ing to what are conceived to have been the original principles 

 of Linngeus : and the author, in submitting his views to the 

 judgment of the scientific world, trusts that they will not be 

 attributed to hasty generalizations, or conjectural theories, but 

 that they will be generally recognized as founded on personal 

 observation of living plants, made during many years' resi- 

 dence on the continent, as well as in this country, and on 

 repeated comparison of specimens collected from the most 

 varied and distant points of the geographical areas of the 

 several species." 



6. Popular names are employed and reduced to a system 

 in accordance with the principles of botanical nomenclature. 

 " An attempt has, on the present occasion, been made to give 

 prominence to a series of English names to the British plants, 

 rendering them as far as possible consistent with the recog- 

 nized principles of systematic nomenclature, so essential for 

 the study of plants. It was at first intended merely to have 

 adopted those which are appended to all the genera and 

 species in Hooker and Arnott's Flora ; but the first attempts 

 to apply them practically, gave evidence that they had never 

 been framed with a view to being used by botanists, or ama- 

 teurs, in the place of the Latin ones. It will be observed 

 that there is among them a continual confusion between popu- 

 lar, trivial, and generic names ; between epithets and specific 

 names ; between substantives and adjectives ; that on frequent 

 occasions one name is applied to several genera, or several 

 names to one genus ; that the number of words forming the 

 name of a plant varies from one to five, instead of being con- 

 stantly two ; and that some of the names put forward as Eng- 

 lish, are very local, almost unknown or obsolete, and no easier 

 to learn than the more useful Latin ones they represent. It 

 became necessary, therefore, thoroughly to revise the whole 

 system, and to recast it ujion the Linna'an principles univer- 

 sally adopted for the Latin botanical names. . . . The full 



