wt oe 
PREFACKH., 
In submitting the following pages as the first means for intro- 
ducing the study of plants into our elementary schools, it is 
incumbent on the writer to explain the reasons, which induced 
him to adopt for his little work the present form, more par- 
ticularly as the method of treating his subject deviates widely 
from the ordinary plan of school-books written for botanical 
teaching. An experience of nearly forty years has convinced the 
author, that the use of a grammar-like publication for initiating 
into a study of plants is alike wearisome to the teacher and 
children, and that as a rule, subject to rare exceptions, the 
knowledge acquired from the ordinary first elementary works 
on Botany is as quickly lost as gained. The only method of 
rendering such studies agreeable and lastingly fruitful consists 
in arousing an interest of the young scholars in the native plants 
of their locality, to afford them all possible facilities to recognise 
and discriminate all the various plants within reach, to lead them 
by observations thus started to comprehend the limits of specific 
forms, of generic and ordinal groups, and to conduct them after- 
wards to the more difficult study of special anatomy and physi- 
ology of plants. The writer had therefore commenced, under the 
title of a “ Victorian School-Flora,” a work descriptive in the 
plainest words of all the plants indigenous within the limits of 
the colony, so that every tree, shrub, herb, rush, grass or fern 
might with comparative ease be recognised from brief descriptions 
AQ” 
