INTRODUCTION. 
it deals. And the smaller, more modern, and more special works 
(such as those of which I myself have been guilty) have never 
yet been allowed by their publishers to be on a scale competent 
to embrace even a tithe of the species about which information 
is desired. Some races, indeed, are worse offenders than others : 
with distraught eye one peruses long lists of Potentillas and 
Violas which are so many strings of naked names, without the 
least guidance as to which are good or bad, tall or short. But 
even in more distinguished races so many are our gaps of know- 
ledge that the average ambitious gardener is either held helpless 
by his ignorance, or forced to become a gambler. Our possessions 
are vastly in excess of our information about them, im fact; and 
all earnest cultivators who want to go on adding to their collec- 
tions, are in urgent need of some authoritative and descriptive 
handbook to their hopes. 
Such, at least, has been my own cry for many seasons, 
whenever I have taken up a seed-list, teeming with names 
of possible treasures unknown and undescribed. On many a 
specious name have I speculated, only to be rewarded with a 
worthless weed. And my call for help is never answered: true 
it is that M. Correvon has lately produced a work which claims 
to be just such a descriptive list. But unfortunately he has em- 
bedded this in so sumptuous a mass of old matter, in the way of 
republished chapters, that the description of each plant has had 
to be compressed into a sort of algebraical formula, which even 
when deciphered proves to yield a picture hardly less jejune than 
those offered by catalogues. Add to this that the list is far from 
adequate or selective, that the descriptions are often doubtful, 
and that M. Correvon is too famous a professor to have any 
slavish respect for others; it will be seen that our prayers for 
help have not been answered. Accordingly at last, and for my 
own edification, I girt up my loins, and made the great plunge. 
Headlong I dived into the deep ocean of original authority ; 
through seas of crabbed Latin did I swim, in search of true 
descriptions, or suggestions of pleasant and possible plants ; 
Boissier became my bedfellow, and the Sargasso Seas of Ledebour 
X11 
