PREFACE IX 



The object I have in view should, I think, be ante- 

 cedent to that of all such studies, namely, to encourage 

 an acquaintance at first hand with the plant in its own 

 home : not merely a knowledge of the characters of the 

 flowers, fruits, &c. which have been chosen by systematists 

 as useful in accepted schemes of classification, but also of 

 those features of buds, twigs, leaves, seeds, seedlings and 

 so forth which are necessarily absent from the typical 

 Flora, although they are employed in special Floras and 

 handbooks used by experts. 



Of course, I am not so naif as to suppose that all such 

 information could be crowded into a work of the kind 

 here contemplated, or that the object in view to attract 

 the student to the plant itself would be advanced if such 

 were accomplished. What is here aimed at is rather to 

 show the kind of work that can be done in this way. 



It may be objected and such objection is character- 

 istic that such a plan involves too much detail. My 

 reply is that there is no such thing as too much detail in 

 the study of Nature : true, the student may be led into 

 too many details, into trying to fix in his mind too many 

 facts about too many organisms, but that is a very 

 different thing from learning to observe thoroughly the 

 many and various peculiarities of structure and adaptation 

 of a group of organisms. 



I have attempted elsewhere to show how such a course 

 of study may be pursued in connection with a particular 

 natural order of plants, allied in the strictly genealogical 

 sense of the systematists, viz. the Grasses. Here the 

 same methods are applied to a group of plants of very 



