PREFACE. 



ABOUT three centuries have elapsed since one of the 

 earliest introductions to Botany upon record was pub- 

 lished, in four pages folio, by Leonhart Fuchs, a learned 

 physician of Tubingen. At that period Botany was 

 nothing more than the art of distinguishing one plant 

 from another, and of remembering the medical qualities, 

 sometimes real, but more frequently imaginary, which 

 experience, or error, or superstition, had ascribed to 

 them. Little was known of Vegetable Physiology, 

 nothing of Vegetable Anatomy, and even the mode of 

 arranging species systematically had still to be dis- 

 covered ; while scarcely a trace existed of those modern 

 views which have raised the science from the mere 

 business of the herb-gatherer to a station among the 

 branches of natural philosophy. 



It now comprehends a knowledge not only of the 

 names and uses of plants, but of their external and 

 internal organisation, their anatomy and physiological 

 phenomena : it involves the consideration of the plan 

 upon which those multitudes of vegetable forms that 

 clothe the earth have been created, of the combinations 

 out of which so many various organs have emanated, of 

 the laws that regulate the dispersion and location of 



