VI PREFACE. 



native plants, and of the influence which particular situations 

 exert in producing changes in their appearances. 



To relieve, however, the dryness of mere descriptive de- 

 tail, and to point out the manner in which this study may 

 be made most conducive to our amusement, if not to our 

 instruction, various particulars have been added relative to the 

 uses of our plants in agriculture, in the arts, and in medicine. 

 And, in the Flora of a river, so celebrated as the Tweed in pas- 

 toral poetry, and c< where flowers of fairy blow," it seemed al- 

 lowable to notice, at greater length than is usual in works of 

 science, the purposes to which superstition has applied them in 

 former times ; and the illustrations which they have afforded 

 to the poets of our own day. A few facts relative to the phy 

 Biology of vegetable life have been also given; but of what I 

 had collected* by far the greater portion has been cancelled, 

 lest our work should have exceeded its proper limits. I can- 

 not, however* but strongly recommend to the young botanist 

 the attentive observation of such phenomena ; it will add 

 greatly to the pleasure of the walks which he must take in 

 search of the objects of his study, and will remove from him 

 the reproach which has sometimes been cast upon us, of being 

 mere collectors of vegetable curiosities, of which we seemed 

 anxious to know nothing beyond the barbarous name that 

 some dull systematist may have given them. I indeed cannot 

 praise the botanist, who has no other object in his excursions 

 than to add a specimen to his herbarium, and who confines his 

 examination of it to those characters by which he ascertains its 

 name in the system. I know well that such investigations are 

 not void of interest, 4t is akin to that which the mathemati- 

 cian feels in the solution of a problem, but Botany has other 



