INTRODUCTION. 



r I ^HE present work is the first complete Illustrated Flora published in this country. Its 



' aim is to illustrate and describe every species, from the Ferns upward, recognized as 



distinct by botanists and growing wild within the area adopted, and to complete the 



work within such moderate limits of size and cost as shall make it accessible to the public 



generally, so that it may serve as an independent handbook of our Northern Flora and as a 



work of general reference, or as an adjunct and supplement to the manuals of systematic 



botany in current use. 



The first edition (6000 copies) was exhausted during the period from 1896 to 1909. The 

 continued public demand for the work has induced the authors to prepare and publish a 

 second edition, which has been materially revised and enlarged. About 300 pages have been 

 added to the text and the number of species illustrated has been increased from 4162 to 

 4666, besides many others redrawn for improvement. This increase of about one-eighth 

 both in the text and in the number of plants figured is due in part to the more complete 

 botanical exploration of the geographical area, in part to the more critical delimitation of 

 species and in part to the introduction, in recent years, of additional alien species from the 

 Old World and from the western and southern United States. Exploration and critical 

 study have been greatly stimulated by the first edition, and much of the additional informa- 

 tion now brought into the second edition was elicited by the use of the first, by students all 

 over the country. 



To all botanical students, a complete illustrated manual is of the greatest service ; always 

 useful, often indispensable. The doubts and difficulties that are apt to attend the best 

 written descriptions will often be instantly solved by figures addressed to the eye. The 

 greatest stimulus, moreover, to observation and study, is a clear and intelligible guide; and 

 among the aids to botanical enquiry, a complete illustrated handbook is one of the chief. 

 Thousands of the lovers of plants, on the other hand, who are not botanists and are not 

 familiar with botanical terms or the methods of botanical analysis, will find in the illustra- 

 tions of a complete work the readiest means of comparison and identification of the plants 

 that .grow around them ; and through the accompanying descriptions they will at the same 

 time acquire a familiarity with botanical language. By these facilities, not only is the study 

 of our native plants stimulated and widened among all classes, but the enjoyment, the knowl- 

 edge and the scientific progress derivable from these studies are proportionately increased. 



Though most European countries have complete illustrations of the flora of their own 

 territory, no similar work has hitherto been attempted here. Our illustrated works, some of 

 them of great value, have been either sumptuous and costly monographs, accessible to com- 

 paratively few, or confined to special groups of plants, or have been works of a minor and 

 miscellaneous character, embracing at most but a few hundred selected species, and from 

 incompleteness, therefore, unsuited for general reference. Scarcely one-third of the species 

 illustrated in the present work have ever been figured before. That no such general work 

 has been previously attempted is to be ascribed partly, perhaps, to the imperfect exploration 

 of our territory, and the insufficiency of the collections to enable such a work to be made 

 approximately complete; partly to the great number of species required to be figured and 

 the consequent difficulty and cost of the undertaking, and partly to the lack of any apparent 

 demand for such a work sufficient to warrant the expense of the enterprise. 



In the first edition, it was shown that many more species existed within the geographical 

 area of the work than previous publications had recorded, and many collectors and students 

 have, since its publication, been eager to detect and describe others. This enthusiasm for 

 additional species had led, in some instances, to the descriptive publication as species, of a 

 considerable number which appear to be not sufficiently different from plants already well 

 known to warrant their recognition as distinct; some of these have been satisfactorily 



