PREFACE 



TO THE SECOND EDITION. 



Two hundred and ninety years have now elapsed 

 since one of the earhest introductions to Botany 

 upon record was pubUshed, 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 Vege- 

 table Anatomy, and even the mode of arranging 

 species systematically had still to be discovered ; 

 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 most in- 

 tellectual 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, and of their anatomy and phy- 

 siological phenomena : it embraces a consideration 

 of the plan upon which those nuiltitudes of vegetable 

 forms that clothe the earth have been created, of the 

 skilful combinations out of which so many various 

 organs have emanated, of the laws that regulate the 

 dispersion and location of species, and of the influ- 



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