1862.] '' JOHN BLACKSTON'E. • 145 



His ambition is to produce a useful^ substantial, and com- 

 prehensive work ; one "which will include the essence of several 

 publications. His desire is to make it serviceable to the greatest 

 number of students by brevity, simplicity, and perspicuity. It 

 will be a genuine " Book of Knowledge '' on the subject of 

 London Botany ; and, in imitation of the title of a book cele- 

 brated many years ago in nurseries and dames' schools, it may 

 be called 'Botany made Easy,' or as the booksellers of those 

 days abridged the name, ' Botany Easy' (Reading Easy). 



There is a common but senseless sneer about the danger of 

 a little knowledge, but it is not the " littleness " of the " learning " 

 that is the " dangerous thing,'' but its incompleteness and inex- 

 actitude. The information supplied on the subject of metro- 

 politan phytology will be neither inexact nor incomplete. 



It may not furnish the student with the qualifications necessary 

 for a public teacher, nor to occupy a professorial botanical chair ; 

 but it will qualify him or her for enjoying and admiring one of 

 the fairest portions of the visible creation, and it will invest a 

 walk, at all seasons and in all places, with an interest and a 

 charm which is unknown to those who are unqualified to esti- 

 mate the beauty of vegetation. 



JOHN BLACKSTONE. 



Some Account of John Blackstone, and a Notice of ' Fasciculus 

 Plantarum circa Harefield sponie nascentium.' {A Catalogue 

 of Harefield Plants.) 



This celebrated London botanist, an apothecary in Fleet 

 Street, and the author of the first complete local Flora which 

 we possess, was probably born about the end of the seventeenth 

 or near the beginning of the eighteenth century. He died in 

 1753. (See Pulteney, vol. ii. p. 273.) 



The sole memorials of Blackstone generally known, are his 

 Flora of Harefield — if our readers will excuse the anachronism, 

 for the term Flora was not used then in its modern sense — and 

 the Specimen botanicum quoted below. There is a copy of Ray's 

 'Synopsis,' the second edition of 1696, which has his autograph, 

 and also that of Thomas Birch, Maii 16, 1753; hence it appears 



N. S. VOL. VI. U 



