INTRODUCTION. 
It is impossible to codify cast-iron rules for the successful 
cultivation of each plant. Only the fool or the tiro dogmatises ; 
the further one progresses in knowledge, the more certain one 
grows of one’s ignorance. The small, faint, illuminated patch of 
our experience only shows up the vast darkness by which our 
little islet of light is surrounded, and makes it seem yet smaller 
by comparison. General rules for cultivation have already been 
abundantly propounded ; and it must never be forgotten that the 
enormous majority of alpine plants require no more. At the 
same time I have also given a general sketch of the conditions 
under which they grow in nature, not because it is by any means 
desirable to copy these with slavish precision, but because, from 
the native circumstances of its success, the enthusiast will soon 
be able to divine the riddle of each plant’s personality and act 
accordingly. It would be idle waste of labour to attempt any 
precise imitation of the natural conditions under which a given 
species thrives; silly, because impossible adequately to do so— 
idle, because very probably it will thrive quite as well, if not 
indeed much better, under quite different ones. Sea-sand plants, 
for instance, are often luxuriant in common loam, and many an 
alpine is fat and happy in the ordinary border. It is only as a 
resource of despair and a confession of failure, after all other 
experiments have failed, that one tries to achieve some empirical 
reproduction of its native circumstances, in the case of an 
especially difficult and recalcitrant treasure. Otherwise, though 
study of a plant’s normal surroundings is of acute interest and 
value, it should be undertaken chiefly as a means of detecting 
the plant’s own character; and estimated, like the Apocrypha, 
as an ensample of right living, but not as in any way essential 
to horticultural salvation. 
For the same reasons I have also given, in most cases, the 
fatherland of each plant, and, wherever possible, the actual rocks 
and circumstances in which it may be seen, not necessarily, of 
course, all of them, but enough to give a general notion of its 
range. To learn that a given species is to be found at low eleva- 
tions on cool limestone rocks of Dalmatia, for instance, may often 
(1,919) xlix D 
