UK* ART 

 W YOV£K 



The Flora Amherstiensis, as here understood, embraces the 

 region within thirty miles of the town of Amherst. The districts thus 

 included, while well associable, afford a sufficient diversity of soils, and 

 other natural features, to give good scope to our enumeration, and make 

 it one worthy of an Academic centre. And the extreme points, while 

 they furnish some important plants not yet but hereafter probably 

 to be found nearer, are by no means so distant from us as they 

 were when the earlier catalogue, which embraced all within " forty or 

 fifty miles of Amherst College/' was prepared. 



The botanical exploration of this region was begun at about the year 

 il817, and resulted in the ample " Catalogue of the Plants growing 

 without cultivation in the vicinity of Amherst College/' which was 

 published by the late President Hitchcock, then Professor of Chemistry 

 and Natural History, in 1829. Among his early coadjutors the author 

 mentions Prof. Stephen "W. "Williams of Deerfield, and Dr. Dennis 

 Cooley, formerly of the same town ; and the herbarium of the latter, 

 '* collected and arranged with great industry," is said to have contained 

 " nearly all the plants hitherto found in this district." (Hitchcock 

 Catal., pref.) And he indicates his indebtedness to Rev., afterwards 

 Prof. Chester Dewey for his assistance in the determination of Carex, to 

 Prof. Lewis C. Beck, in the Ferns and Mosses, and to Prof. Torrey 

 jO "in almost every part, . . . especially the Grasses, and the Class 

 CT> Cryptogamia." 



^- For nearly thirty years scarcely anything was added, in print, to the 

 ^sl Amherst Catalogue. But North American Botany had taken a new 

 £v~ shape during that period, in the hands especially of Drs. Torrey and 

 CL.. Gray; and the Text-book and Manual of the latter author had become 



