PREFACE. 



The great importance of the vegetable kingdom, whether it be 

 considered as affording aliment, clothing, or medicine to the 

 human race, is so obvious as to require no demonstration. If 

 we recur to the earliest periods of the history of our globe, we 

 observe the first dawn of medical science in the employment 

 of those productions which, springing up in such abundance, 

 and affording as they did to primeval man the chief, if not the 

 only article of food, were naturally resorted to as the most 

 suitable remedies for disease and pain. Through every suc- 

 ceeding age, plants have attracted a large share of attention, and 

 have formed the chief resources of the healing art ; and though 

 for a time disregarded, in the rage for minerals and visionary 

 schemes of treatment, it may be safely affirmed, that they con- 

 stitute the most potent, tractable, and valuable agents with 

 which the physician is acquainted ; and, as the clouds which 

 still in some degree envelope their qualities and mode of action 

 are dispersed, their importance will become more eminently 

 conspicuous. 



It is a trite remark, but not the less true, that the indigenous 

 plants of Britain are too much neglected : this is doubtless, in 

 great measure, the result of that undue preference for all that 

 is novel and rare, and difficult to be procured, so characteristic 

 of human nature ; to which may be added, that partial and 

 disingenuous spirit of criticism which condemns without inves- 

 tigating, and would deprive an object of all its excellencies, 

 because it is sanctioned by the voice of antiquity or the home- 

 liness of rustic practice. 



