PREFACE. 



This volume has been prepared with reference to the needs of those 

 who, whether as studying in our high schools, academies and colleges, 

 or as private students and amateurs, desire to make some beginnings in 

 the systematic botany of middle western California. In order that the 

 volume should be small, it was necessary that the scope of it should be 

 limited. So exceedingly varied is the flora of even limited areas in our 

 State, that not even all the flowering plants of the counties touching 

 San Francisco Bay could be briefly but sufficiently classified and 

 described within the limit of three hundred and fifty octavo pages. 

 We have therefore been obliged to conclude this Flora for beginners 

 at the end of the ninetieth of our natural orders of flowering plants. 

 These ninety embrace, however, all in our district which the novice in 

 plant determination would be likely to take up, and a number of genera 

 and species much greater than the beginner may master in one season's 

 study, or in three. Thus no complaint will arise that the sedges and 

 grasses, the pondweeds and the ferns have been omitted from this 

 brief and more or less tentative treatise. 



The old practices of preparing a digest of the genera under the larger 

 natural orders, and of italicizing some of the salient marks of species as 

 described, have been continued here; though with misgiving as to their 

 real usefulness in general; it being too well known, by all teachers of 

 the subject, that the pupil will rely on the "key" and on the italicized 

 words unduly, and to his own misleading also, in some instances, instead 

 of attending to all the terms of the full diagnosis. Still, the digests and 

 keys are real aids to many a serious beginner in the work of plant class- 

 ification. 



In justice to the critical labor that has been bestowed on the plants of 

 even this small area, by the author, it must be said that this Manual is 

 one which the critical botanist will find indispensable, at least, until 

 some worthier treatise shall take its place. On ground so new as this of 

 the San Francisco Bay Region it still remains, and for years to come it 

 will remain, that new convictions will be formed as to the limits of 

 species and of genera; that every book or pamphlet of this kind the 

 subject matter of which has been wrought out under the eye of a 

 competent student, will present new specific and perhaps new generic 

 propositions. This Manual will be found to contain not a few such. 



