I 



PREFACE. 



In the volumes, issued by our Acclimation Society from 1871 to 

 1875, four contributions bave appeared, concerning such industrial 

 plants as are available for culture in this colony. These writings 

 were mainly offered with a view of promoting the introduction 

 and diffusion of the very many kinds of plants, which in our 

 geographic latitudes may be extensively reared in forests, on 

 fields or pastures. The prints, thus originated, became however 

 accessible merely to the members of the Society, while frequent 

 calls arose for these or some similar data throughout our 

 community. The whole has therefore now been reissued in a 

 rearranged and largely supplemented form as a departmental 

 publication with ministerial approval. As stated in the preface 

 to the original essays, they do not claim completeness either 

 as a specific index or as a series of notes on the respective 

 technologic applicability of the plants enumerated. But what 

 these writings perhaps may aspire to is the aim of bringing to- 

 gether closely-arrayed some condensed notes in popular language 

 on all the principal utilitarian plants hitherto known to prosper 

 in extra-tropic zones. Information of this kind is widely scattered 

 through many and often voluminous works in several languages, 

 yet such volumes treating perhaps on countries with a climatic 

 zone far more narrow than ours. Only a share of the books, 

 which it was desirable to consult, were at my command, hence the 

 necessity of successive further supplements, even irrespective of 



