302 Advantages and Disadvantages of 
One main object with the Professor was, as I have under- 
stood, to illustrate the botany of the classics; but, with the 
single exception of the occasional synonymes of Dioscorides, 
nothing of the kind is to be found in the pages hitherto pub- 
lished of this costly and splendid Flora. 
Again, it often happens that a work is discontinued because 
it is not found to answer. Many, I believe, of our finest 
works on natural history, to the credit of their authors be it 
spoken, have been undertaken, not so much for the sake, or 
with the expectation, of making money by them, as from a 
genuine disinterested love of the subject itself; a subject in 
perfect unison with the author’s own feelings and pursuits. 
At the same time, it is hardly to be expected, at least not in 
the generality of cases, that a man should expend his time 
and labour on a work from which he not only derives no 
emolument, but by which he is absolutely out of pocket at the 
year’s end. There is, however, a handsome as well as an 
unhandsome way of discontinuing a work that does not an- 
swer : I call it unhandsome to break off abruptly in the begin- 
ning or middle of a volume, and thus leaving the pur chasers 
in the lurch, with a forlorn piece of a fragment, bearing about 
the same proportion to the whole original design, as the two 
or three first courses of bricks and mortar to do the stately 
edifice of which they form the foundation. I forbear to name 
instances in point, though I easily could do so. As an ex- 
ample of the handsome manner, I may mention the case of 
Professor Hooker’s Miésci Exétic?, the discontinuance of 
which all lovers of cryptogamic botany must regret. Finding 
that the undertaking did not meet with sufficient encourage- 
ment (he dost money by the work), Dr. Hooker candidly 
stated to the public, that he was, however reluctantly, under 
the unavoidable necessity of relinquishing it; and accordingly 
closed the work at the end of the second volume. 
T will not lay much stress on the liability to which pur- 
chasers are exposed of having imperfect numbers sent to 
them — numbers accidentally deficient j in one or more of the 
plates, or in the descriptive letterpress; because, if through 
inattention they suffer these deficiencies to remain unsupplied, 
the fault is with themselves, and they have no one else to 
blame; yet there is occasionally not a little difficulty and 
demur. in rectifying these errors, and this difficulty is, no 
doubt, in itself an evil. 
I now proceed to the most painful part of the task I have 
proposed to myself, namely, to call attention to those disad- 
vantages of the periodical system which may, and therefore 
ought, to be avoided. This, I say, is the most painful part of 
