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 purchasers 

 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 Musci Exotici, the discontinuance of 

 which all lovers of cryptogamic botany must regret. Finding 

 that the undertaking did not meet with sufficient encourage- 

 ment (he lost 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. 



I will not lay much stress on the liability to which pur- 

 chasers are exposed of having imperfect numbers sent to 

 them — numbers accidentally deficient 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 

 might, to be avoided. This, I say, is the most painful part of 



