8 FLORA INDICA. 



work up those Natural Orders with which they are most fa- 

 miliar, the Flora Indica, when completed, will probably con- 

 sist of a series of monographs. In the commencement now 

 offered to the public, we have arranged the principal Natural 

 Orders in the mode of sequence usually adopted in systematic 

 works, altering the places of a few of the smaller ones, whose 

 botanical afl&nities we cbnceive to have been misunderstood. 



We consider it important that the Flora Indica should em- 

 brace as wide an area as possible, as we are firmly convinced 

 that no species can be properly defined, until it has been ex- 

 amined in aU the variations induced by those differences in 

 climate, locality, and soil, which an extensive area alone af- 

 fords. As also the flora of an area cannot be worked out 

 without a knowledge of the botany of the countries surround- 

 ing it (with which it has many plants in common), it follows 

 that the greater the area embraced, the more fully will it il- 

 lustrate the habits, forms, and variations, of the species com- 

 prised within it. For this reason we have extended the limits 

 of our Flora from Persia to the Chinese dominions. 



II. General considerations connected with the study of 

 Systematic Botany. 



It may seem almost chimerical to look forward to a time 

 when all the species of the vegetable world shall have been 

 classified upon philosophical principles, and accurately de- 

 fined ; and it must be confessed that the present state of de- 

 scriptive botany does not hold out much prospect of the reali- 

 zation of so very desirable an object. This, we think, is in a 

 great measure due, not to any want of students willing and 

 anxious to take up the subject, but rather to a gradually in- 

 creasing misapprehension of the true aim and paramount im- 

 portance of systematic botany, and of the proper mode of 

 pursuing the study of the laws that govern the affinities of 

 plants. We are therefore desirous, at the outset of a work 

 which is devoted to these subjects, of explaining our views on 



