PREFACE TO THE FOURTH EDITION 



It was never intended that a complete revision should be made of this 

 Cyclopedia. I hoped that its publication would establish and concrete the 

 horticultural activities of its time and become a measure, even though a very 

 imperfect one, of the progress that we had made. Two reprints have been 

 called for, and now a third is wanted. In the two repi'ints I have corrected such 

 errors as have been called to my attention or as I have discovered, but even 

 these changes have been much fewer than I had anticipated. In the present 

 edition I have made a very few other changes in the plates, after having asked 

 for corrections from practically all the contributors. In addition, I have 

 inserted the conspectus of families and genera (or "key") that was prepared 

 by Wilhelm Miller for the original edition but which was omitted for lack of 

 space; aud I am writing this preface, at the request of the publishers, in 

 order to suggest some of the lines of current horticultural progress. Of course 

 I cannot hope that the mere technical errors are eliminated from the work, — 

 these will develop with the further use of the book; but I trust that the num- 

 ber of serious mistakes is proportionally small. Perhaps it is not out of place^ 

 for me to say that these years intervening since the work was published have 

 only strengthened the wish that I might have the opportunity to make the 

 Cyclopedia all over again from start to finish, so short does it seem to fall of 

 the plans and hopes that I had made for it; but this cannot be, and it must 

 remain for other hands in other years to complete a better and more harmoni- 

 ous efEort. This effort, however, must wait for the development of exacter 

 studies in the various fields. 



Before passing to the proper subject of my preface, I must repeat that the 

 Cyclopedia does not attempt to include all native wild plants that have merit 

 for domestication, nor even all domesticated plants; it aims to comprise only 

 those that were "in the trade" at the time of the compilation of the book, and 

 the reasons for restricting the work to this field are set forth in the preface to 

 the original Vol. IV. I feel obliged to call attention to this plan in order to 

 answer the questions of many correspondents as to why this or that plant was 

 omitted . 



I still hope that the. supplementary volumes that are suggested in the 

 original preface may be prepared, in order to keep the horticultural annals 



(ix) 



