AND ORNAMENTAL TREATMENT. 6i 



student will find in such authors as Owen Jones, Dresser, and others, these matters very fully 

 handled ; we have, therefore, in the present work, striven rather to occupy ground not so fully 

 pre-occupied. Such a work as this should, however, if rightly viewed, be regarded only as a 

 means to an end, and that end the individual study of Nature itself It has been our desire to 

 produce a book that should prove sufficiently suggestive to the reader to lead him to study farther 

 for himself, and certainly not to rest wholly on our labours. It is too much the custom with many 

 manufacturers to recklessly appropriate the ideas of others ; too much the fashion with many 

 designers to tread closely in the footsteps of those who, by a successful idea, have diverted 

 thought in that direction. It has not been our aim to produce a series of designs that might be, 

 at slight expenditure of thought or labour, adapted to various commercial purposes, but rather to 

 refer manufacturers and designers alike to that wealth of fancy that may be so readily developed 

 and utilised by a consideration of the beauty and wealth of Nature, and by an adaptation to 

 ornamental purposes of those general principles of plant growth, and those varied details that 

 repay a closer study, that would render the work produced at once more novel in conception and 

 more beautiful in effect than would probably be the result of a merely modified treatment of some 

 idea that, once novel and possibly good, has long since got too well-worn to be able to claim any 

 credit on the first score, while even its recurring goodness, assuming that it possesses it, is, after 

 all, not wholly desirable, since it usurps the place that some other equally beautiful and fresher form 

 might have taken, and imposes a narrowness of scope that the abundant wealth of floral beauty does 

 not justify. 



In presenting to our readers a series of drawings of natural plants, and endeavouring to aid 

 them by suggestions of their use in design, we have, we trust, in some measure supplied a 

 want, since, though there are many excellent standard works on Botanical Science, many equally 

 excellent standard works on Ornamental Art, there are but few, so far as we are aware, that endea- 

 vour to show the relationship existing between them. Should our work, by its utility, prove that 

 we have in some measure reached our ideal, our labours, pleasant as they have been in themselves, 

 will have that pleasure greatly enhanced by the knowledge that others besides ourselves have found 

 them of interest and profit ; that we have thus been ' in some small way instrumental both in 

 inculcating a greater taste for natural beauty, and in aiding incidentally the spread of the beautiful 

 in art. With all its failings — and in no mock modesty do we eicaggerate them — our work has been 

 throughout a labour of love, and with a feeling of real regret do we find it drawing to its close. 

 If we have failed in causing this feeling to be shared at all by our readers, it will, we trust, be 

 considered no disparagement to our subject, it will only shew that fair Nature has been unfortunate 

 in her self-appointed spokesman, in that we have failed to convey to others the sense of delight 

 that her study is nevertheless able so richly to afford. 



