INTRODUCTION. XXXVI 
of our tables. The florist lays down a certain arbi- 
trary standard of perfection, and attempts to make 
flowers conform to that model. Whether it be in 
good taste or not to value all flowers, in proportion 
as they accord with an artificial and comparatively in- 
elastic standard of this kind, we need not stop to 
enquire; suffice it to say, that taking the matter in its 
broadest sense, the aim of the florist is to pro- 
duce large, symmetrical flowers, brightly and purely 
coloured, or if parti-coloured, the colours must be 
distinct, harmonious, or contrasted. When all this is 
done, the flower, in most instances, becomes ‘mon- 
strous’ of the eyes in the botanist, though all the more 
interesting to the student of morphology on that 
account. In like manner the double flowers, the 
* breaks,” the “* sports” which the florist cultivates so 
anxiously, are all of them greater or less deviations 
from the ordinary form, while the broccolies, the 
cabbages, and many other products of our kitchen 
gardens and fields owe the estimation m which they 
are held entirely to those peculiarities which, by an 
unhappy application of words, are called monstrous 
by botanists. Grafting, layering, the “ strikmg”’ of 
cuttings, the formation of adventitious roots and buds, 
processes on which the cultivator so greatly relies 
for the propagation and extension of his plants, are 
also matters with which teratology concerns itself. 
Again the difficulty experienced occasionally in getting 
vines, strawberries, &c., to set properly, may some- 
times be accounted for by that mherent tendency 
which some plants possess of exchanging an_her- 
maphrodite for a unisexual condition. 
For reasons then of direct practical utility, no 
d 
