INTRODUCTION. 



It was with no desire to compete with scientific botanies that this 

 collection of flowers was gathered together, but with the hope of 

 making their acquaintance more easy to non-scientific folk than the 

 much condensed manuals of our flora are able to do. The oppor- 

 tunity of introducing a plant, with that graceful amplitude which fore- 

 stalls human meetings, is denied to the scientific botanist by the needful 

 restrictions of his formulae, and there remain unnoted by him (because 

 beyond the scope of a special terminology) numberless traits of race- 

 habit, and personal details of growth belonging to the plants, to which 

 the unlearned observer will attach a degree of significance, incommen- 

 surate, perhaps, to their scientific value. To the simple Nature-lover 

 each growth possesses a personal quality more desii'able than the cata- 

 logued facts of its existence, and which offers an invitation to his 

 thought beyond the knowledge he may gain from books. 



Supplementary, then, to the scientific classification, there is a place 

 for the mere lover and observer, who shall display the results of his 

 study in the most direct terms, that require no glossaries of explanation, 

 nor, if it may be avoided, any dissection of flower-growths. Too often 

 the amateur is dismayed, in his effort to name a plant, by the botanical 

 need of a microscopic analysis, which calls for a preliminary training,, 

 and in its process destroys the flower he seeks to know. If it were 

 possible for a pictorial botany to be prepared for English readers in the 



