PREFACE. 



Yll 



In 1832 The Sijlva Americana was published in Boston, in a single octavo volume. 

 The author, Mr. D. J. Browne, made no claim to originality, and the work was a 

 hasty compilation from the writings of Michaux and other authors. A second edition 

 of this work, enlarged to contain accounts of several foreign trees borrowed from 

 Loudon's Arboretum Britanmcum, was published in New York, in 1846, under the title 

 of The Trees of America, 



About 1850, or a little later, Professor Asa Gray undertook to prepare, under 

 the auspices of the Smithsonian Institution, an illustrated work on the trees of this 

 country. Twenty-two plates were lithographed for it from drawings made in color 

 by Isaac Sprague, but no text was prepared, and the work was then abandoned. 



Another effort to prepare a Silva of America Avas made in 1858, when Dr. H. U. 

 Piper, of Woburn, Massachusetts, published sixty-four pages of The Trees of America, 

 illustrated with thirteen well-executed portraits of various trees selected from dif- 

 ferent parts of the country, without regard, however, to any systematic arrangement. 

 The publication was then discontinued. 



The next attempt at anything like an account of all the trees of this country 

 appeared in 1858, in which year Dr. J. G, Cooper published, in the Proceedings of the 

 Smithsonian Institution, a list of the arborescent species of the country, with special 

 reference to theii* geographical distribution, supplementing his first paper by a second 

 published two years later, 



A catalogue of the forest trees of the United States, with notes and brief de- 

 scriptions of the most important species, was published in Washington in 1876, by 

 Dr. George Yasey, the botanist of the United States Department of Agriculture, to 

 illustrate the collection of wood sections which formed part of the Centennial Exhi- 

 bition at Philadelphia. Four hundred and nineteen species were enumerated in 

 this catalogue. 



The last general work on American trees appeared in Yolume IX. of the Final 

 Reports of the Tenth Census of the United States, published in 1883, to which I ( f'^f^'^^^ 



added a catalogue of the forest trees of North America with their synonymy and 

 bibhography, with remarks upon their distribution, size, and uses, and with an account 

 of the value and properties of their wood, based on a series of original investigations 

 made by Mr. S. P. Sharpies, of Cambridge. This catalogue contained four hundred 

 and twelve species. It was substantially reprinted in New York in 1885, under the 

 title of The Woods of the United States, as a guide to the Jesup collection of North 

 American woods in the American Museum of Natural History. 



A few publications devoted to purely botanical accounts of particular groups of 

 trees, and others descriptive of the trees of parts of the country, have added largely 

 to our knowledge of the American silva. The most important of the former are 

 Dr. George Engelmann*s papers on the Oaks and on different genera of Conifers, 

 the result of years of patient study. The most comprehensive of the latter is Mr. 

 George B. Emerson's Report on the Trees and Shrubs Growing Naturally in the Forests 

 of Massachusetts. This work, which is a model of its kind, was published in one vol- 

 ume, in 1846, under the auspices of the Commonwealth. A reprint in two volumes, 



