INTRODUCTION. 



PERHAPS it is not too much to say that the wild flower 

 of late has become popular. If such is the case I am 

 presumably justified in presenting it in a new light, or, 

 to speak more to the point, in the position it occu- 

 pies according to the light of one who loves to draw it. 



Quite recently, in a conversation about art with Mr. 

 Fosdick, the artist, he remarked to me that those who 

 followed our profession were legitimately and continu- 

 ally seeking after expression regardless of limitation. I 

 have since thought this was a very happy truth. Per- 

 haps, therefore, it is sufficient to account for the exist- 

 ence of a volume on our American flora, fully one half 

 of which is pictures. 



This is a field-book of wild flowers ; it originated in 

 the fields and it is intended to go back there, I trust, in 

 the hand of its good reader. Of course, not all of it was 

 written on sunny meadow and in shady wood, nor were 

 all of its illustrations made at once from specimens gath- 

 ered during various botanical rambles ; but, in the truest 

 sense of the word, nearly all of the book is a direct 

 result of field work, ranging from New Hampshire to 

 Virginia, 



Not many years ago, my highly esteemed friend, the 

 late William Hamilton Gibson, in the course of an ad- 

 dress he was delivering before the Society of American 

 Florists, said that some day he hoped to write a botany 

 in plain English. It is unnecessary to add that if he 

 had lived to do so, in all probability he would have con- 

 tributed as much to our happiness as the father of 

 American botany, Dr. Asa Gray. Undoubtedly he felt, 

 as the rest of us have felt, the great need of simple, un- 

 technical English in direct connection with botany. 

 But there are difficulties to face in even a modest at- 

 tempt to avoid bothersome technicalities. We must 



