INTRODUCTION. 
Tritt within a comparatively recent period but little 
study was given to exceptional formations. They 
were considered as monsters to be shunned, as lawless 
deviations from the ordinary rule, unworthy the atten- 
tion of botanists, or at best as objects of mere curiosity. 
By those whose notions of structure and conforma- 
tion did not extend beyond the details necessary to 
distinguish one species from another, or to describe the 
sahent features of a plant in technical language ; whose 
acquaintance with botanical science might almost be 
said to consist in the conventional application of a 
number of arbitrary terms, or in the recollection of a 
number of names, teratology was regarded as a chaos 
whose meaningless confusion it were vain to attempt 
to render intelligible,-—as a barren field not worth the 
labour of tillage. 
The older botanists, it is true, often made them the 
basis of satirical allusions to the political or religious 
questions of the day, especially about the time of the 
Reformation, and the artists drew largely upon their 
polemical sympathies in their representations of these 
anomalies. Linnzeus treated of them to some extent in 
his ‘ Philosophia,’ but it is mainly to Augustin Pyra- 
mus De Candolle that the credit is due of calling atten- 
tion to the importance of vegetable teratology. This 
