PBEFACE. 



THE FIRST PART of this work, together with the woodcuts illustrating the 

 Natural Orders, is a reprint of the ' Atlas Ele*mentaire de la Botanique/ edited 

 by one of the Authors some years ago, and which has been favourably re- 

 ceived by the scientific public. This, however, being devoted to European 

 Orders, and confined to brief systematic descriptions only of these, could not 

 illustrate the affinities of all the known types of the Vegetable Kingdom. 

 To supply this deficiency, We have here added nearly all the exotic Orders, 

 with detailed descriptions of their affinities and uses ; so as to give such a 

 general view of the Vegetable Kingdom as may be advantageously consulted 

 by students and professed botanists. 



For the sequence of the Orders we have followed the classification of 

 A. de Jussieu l in the valuable article on Taxonomy in the ' Dictionnaire 

 Universel,' simply inverting the series, so as to commence with the most 

 highly organized, and end with the Families of lowest organization, whose 

 history is still obscure. 



The reader will observe that We have treated the Monocotyledons and 

 Cryptogams with greater fulness than the Dicotyledons : this is because the 

 two first, and especially the Cryptogams, having hitherto been much less fully 

 studied than the Dicotyledons, required much more careful illustration. 



We have also thought it best to detach from the larger groups many 

 monotypic Orders, so as to give them greater prominence ; following in this 



1 In this English edition the Editor has, with bodies of Great Britain, as well as of working bo- 



the approval of the authors, adopted that inodifi- tanists, herbarium keepers, &c. A sketch of A. de 



cation of the elder Jussieu's system known as De Jussieu's sequence of the Families will be found in 



Candolle's, in order to suit the convenience of the the chapter devoted to Taxonomy (p. 167 ; see also 



Universities, Medical Schools, and other educational p. 988). 



