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glance at the previously published general Floras of this country, 

 commencing with the magnum opus of Sir J. E. Smith, in 1828.* 



Although arranged according to what it has lately been the fashion 

 to disparage by the appellation of an antiquated and useless system, 

 the ' English Flora ' will never be superseded as a work of standard 

 authority on the botanical productions of Great Britain. Whatever 

 may be its faults, they are doubtless attributable to the state of 

 Botany in England at the period when it was written, and are infi- 

 nitely outnumbered by its merits, which are its own, and have been 

 justly acknowledged by all subsequent writers on Botany. The ap- 

 pearance of a work of such high authority, in the English language, 

 gave a new impulse to the study of British plants, and laid the foun- 

 dation for the more exact discrimination of our native species ; unfor- 

 tunately, however, its bulk and consequent price placed it beyond the 

 reach of many a humble but ardent student, who was obliged to rest 

 content with the more accessible and more portable ' Compendium 

 Florae Britannicae,' if he understood Latin — or with Galpine's ' Syn- 

 optical Compend,' Macgillivray's Withering, or the ' Compendium of 

 the English Flora,' if his literary acquirements extended only to the 

 English language. All these were exceedingly useful books, to the 

 travelling botanist more especially; but the three of the highest au- 

 hority — the Compendiums — laid claim to little more than the merit 

 of being correct indexes to the larger works. In 1830 appeared the' 

 first edition of Hooker's ' British Flora,' intended, as the author says 

 in the preface, " Istly, to provide the young student with a descrip- 

 tion of our native plants, arranged according to the simplest method ; 

 and 2dly, to afford to the more experienced botanist, a manual, that 

 should be useful in the field as well as the closet." The first object 

 was gained by the adoption of the Linneean method ; the second, by 

 happily steering a middle course between the two extremes of de- 

 voting so much space to the descriptions and synonyms as would in- 

 crease the bulk of the book, or so curtailing the characters that they 

 would scarcely be available for specific discrimination by the majo- 

 rity of those for whose use the work was intended. That the idea 

 was a happy one, and on the whole well worked out, can scarcely be 

 doubted, when we consider that within about ten years from its first 

 appearance, four large editions of the ' British Flora ' in its original 

 form have been disposed of; but we must confess that we do greatly 



* The first volume of Smith's 'English Flora' was published in 1824, but the 

 work was not completed until 1828, when the fourth volume appeared, accompanied 

 by a reprint of the preceding three volumes. 



