SUBSCRIPTION EDITION. 
THE 
NATURAL HISTORYor PLANTS 
THEIR FORMS, GROWTH, 
REPRODUCTION, AND DISTRIBUTION. 
eo a a a oa sa oe © 
FROM THE GERMAN OF 
ANTON KERNER von MARILAUN, 
PROFESSOR OF BOTANY IN THE UNIVERSITY OF VIENNA, 
BY F. W. OLIVER, M.A., D.Sc., 
QUAIN PROFESSOR OF BOTANY IN UNIVERSITY COLLEGE, LONDON, 
WITH THE ASSISTANCE OF 
MARIAN BUSK, B.Sc., AND MARY EWART, B.Se. 
. J * “ “ “ . . . . . . 
With over 1000 Original Woodcut Illustrations 
and 
Sixteen Plates in Colours. 
ERNER’S Narurat History or PLants, now for the first time 
presented to English readers, is one of the greatest works in 
Botany ever issued from the press. Its province is the whole realm of 
Plant Life, and its purpose, as conceived by the author, Professor Anton 
Kerner von Marilaun, of Vienna University, is to provide “a book not 
only for specialists and scholars, but also for the many”. 
To the preparation of the work Professor Kerner has devoted a quarter 
of a century of earnest labour, bringing to bear upon it the highest 
professional knowledge, experience, and skill. It is thus in nowise a 
sweeping together of current views, but has the rounded completeness 
of an original work of art; it might indeed be fitly named The Epic of 
Plant Life. 
With the grasp and mastery of a thorough botanist and skilled 
expositor, Professor Kerner shows us the plant in its varied natural 
surroundings, and tells in plain terms, shorn of needless technicalities, the 
story of its life—how its food supply is obtained under all sorts of con- 
ditions and built up into its own substance; how it grows, adapts itself 
to its environment, reproduces itself, and dies. He explains and describes 
