viii FAMILIAR TREES AND THEIR LEAVES. 



filled with untold billions of leaves, no tvjo of tvhieh 

 are exactly alike. 



It is undoubtedly the fact that we do not fully 

 appreciate either the beauty or the usefulness of 

 trees ; but after we have become really familiar with 

 them, and have learned readily to distinguish the dif- 

 ferent species, we find ourselves in a new world of 

 absorbing interest, in which beauty and use have ex- 

 panded to proportions far beyond our previous con- 

 ceptions. 



I have ventured to draw the trees and their leaves 

 just as I have found them. My two hundred and odd 

 sketches were all taken from Nature, and only sixty 

 of these from pressed specimens which were obtained 

 at the Harvard Botanic Garden. Yet I have found 

 the world of truth and beauty, as far as leaves are 

 concerned, so limitless, that types and rules seemed 

 valuable only as guide-boards are on a strange path : 

 a typical leaf does not reveal all the leaf truth, any 

 more than a guide-board notes all the turns and twists 

 in the path. 



I have considered it neither wise nor necessarv to 



t/ 



confine the drawings to a uniform scale ; many of 

 them are about one half natural size, but the re- 

 mainder are adjusted to the limited space which the 

 book allows. As often as the case requires, the di- 

 mensions of a leaf are recorded. 



