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PREFACE 



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^HE preparation of this work has pleasantly occupied my spare hours from 



business during the last eight years. 



Finding from the outset that it was impossible to successfully study the Crocuses 

 from herbarium specimens without the concurrent help of the living plants, my first 

 effort was to obtain for cultivation the various species that had not heretofore been 

 introduced. 



Besides a considerable number collected by Mr. Elwes and myself in the south 

 of Europe, North Africa, the Mediterranean Islands, the Levant and Asia Minor, I 

 have been largely indebted to the kindness of many friends as well as to residents 

 abroad, to whom I am personally unknown, for the willing help they have rendered 

 me in the collection of nearly all the known species, many of them till now undes- 

 cribed, from remote districts. I have thus been enabled to grow in my garden 

 at Benthall Hall, Shropshire, almost the entire genus, to watch the life-course of 

 each species, and to make at my leisure the drawings of the plants, both in fruit 

 and in flower, which have been here reproduced in the coloured plates. 



I have also examined the collections of Croc/ in nearly all the continental and 

 British Herbaria, and have had the advantage of more complete materials to work 

 from than were procurable by those who have previously written on the genus. 



Amongst those who have helped me I must express the special obligations I 

 have been under to Mr. R. Barker, of Smyrna; the late Mr. G. Bentham; the late 

 Colonel Burnaby; Mr. A. Biliotti, Her Majesty's Consul at Trebizond; Mr. W. 

 Bourne, of Gijon, Spain; Mons. Boissier and Mons. Barbery, of Valleyres, Switzer- 

 land; Mr. J. G. Baker, of Kew; the late Professor Cesati, of Naples; Seiior J. A. 

 Carreras, of Port Mahon, Minorca; Mr. W. Carruthers, of the British Museum; 

 Colonel R. Trevor Clarke, of Welton Place, Daventry; Mons. De Candolle, of 

 Geneva; the late Rev. H. Harpur Crewe, of Drayton Beauchamp; Mr. and Mrs. 

 C. G Danford, of Ayres End, Harpenden, St. Albans; the Rev. Canon Ellacombe, 

 of Bitton, Bristol; Mr. Henry J. Elwes, of Cirencester; Mr. Harry Fox, of Wellington, 



