Introduction. xxi 



It should be understood at starting that no one can expect 

 to get any considerable knowledge of the plants around him 

 without taking the trouble to master two branches of the 

 subject mentioned in the above extract : 1, the scientific 

 classification of plants ; 2, the technical terms used in botany. 

 Further on in this introduction information will be found as 

 to these two matters, sufficient, it is hoped, to enable any 

 student to go pretty far in the identification of the plants 

 around him. With regard to the second point, viz. the 

 technical terms, a certain amount of apology seems necessary. 

 It is certain that many people are repelled from the study of 

 botany by the number of difficult and unusual words used to 

 describe even the most familiar parts of common flowers. But 

 " though most readers probably entertain at first a persuasion 

 that a writer ought to content himself with the use of common 

 words in their common sense, and feel a repugnance to techni- 

 cal terms and arbitrary rules of phraseology as pedantic and 

 troublesome, yet it is soon found by the student of any branch 

 of science that, without technical terms and fixed rules, there 

 can be no certain or progressive knowledge. . . . Technical 

 description is in reality the only description which is clearly in- 

 telligible, but that technical language cannot be understood with- 

 out being learnt as any other language is learnt." Whewell. 1 



In this book I have endeavoured to cut down the purely 

 technical words to the smallest number possible, and I have 

 dispensed with a good many commonly used by scientific 

 botanists, without, I hope, increasing the difficulty of identifi- 

 cation. 



The mode in which the scientific part of this book is made 

 up is as follows. The nomenclature and classification are 

 entirely those of Hooker's "Indian Flora ;" the descriptions of 

 orders are mainly Hooker's, but with details from other 

 writers ; the descriptions of genera are Hooker's, very much 

 compressed, firstly, by the omission of microscopical details, 

 secondly, by the omission of all characteristics which do not 

 apply to all the species of the genus thus getting rid of the 

 alternatives which so greatly abound in most purely scientific 

 works. The descriptions of species are taken in the main from 

 my own notes, as I was in the habit of writing a full descrip- 

 tion of each plant when I first saw it, and afterwards comparing 

 1 Hist. Inductive Sciences, iii. 340. 



