INTEODUGTION. 



Till within a comparatively recent period but little 

 study was given to exceptional formations. They 

 were considered as monsters to be shunned, as lawless 

 deviations from the ordinary rule, unworthy the atten- 

 tion of botanists, or at best as objects of mere curiosity. 

 By those whose notions of structure and conforma- 

 tion did not extend beyond the details necessary to 

 distinguish one species from another, or to describe the 

 salient features of a plant in technical language ; whose 

 acquaintance with botanical science might almost be 

 said to consist in the conventional application of a 

 number of arbitrary terms, or in the recollection of a 

 niimber of names, teratology was regarded as a chaos 

 whose meaningless confusion it were vain to attempt 

 to render intelligible, as a barren field not worth the 

 labour of tillage. 



The older botanists, it is true, often made them the 

 basis of satirical allusions to the pohtical or religious 

 questions of the day, especially about the time of the 

 Reformation, and the artists drew largely upon their 

 polemical sympathies in their representations of these 

 anomalies. Linnseus treated of them to some extent in 

 his * Philosophia,* but it is mainly to Augustin Pyra- 

 mus De CandoUo that the credit is due of calling atten- 

 tion to the importance of vegetable teratology. This 



