PREFATORY vii 
The pursuit of every study must have a beginning, 
and every wandering quest its inspiration. 
If this rudimentary effort should perchance 
implant a love anywhere of Tree Study, depend 
upon it the victim of the craze will not rest until 
he has acquired and ransacked the great works of 
past masters of the art. But be it remembered, 
a Greek scholar does not commence his studies 
with Plato. 
Again, any apology is discounted by the fact that 
all distinguished and exhaustive writers upon such 
subjects, and cognate subjects, go back to the inves- 
tigation of their predecessors in the shades. They 
work on the land prepared, and add a little to its 
fertility each time they plunge their spade. Our 
object is far more lowly; it is to make the well- 
turned soil more friable, a little more easy to work. 
Loudon wrote exhaustively up to date, but his date 
became out of date, and some of the works of to-day, 
complete and exhaustive as they are, will become 
out of date in their turn, and have to be written up 
to time. Chinese plants introduced by Wilson and 
Forrest will have grown up and awakened new in- 
terests. Further observations will have been made of 
them, and they will call forth a new writer to portray 
them, to sing their merits, or sound their requiem. 
The great writers of to-day will in their turn 
become the predecessors in the shades, and new 
scribes will arise to carry still farther forward the 
mighty tasks of investigation they so ably in their 
day chronicled. There’s a running truth in the 
lines of Rudyard Kipling, which underlies the action 
of many authorities of many ’ologies : 
It all comes out of the books I read, 
It all goes into,the books I write, 
I am one who unhesitatingly and unrepentantly pleads 
guilty to this indictment. 
