PREFACE 
TO THE SECOND EDITION. 
Two hundred and ninety years have now elapsed 
since one of the earUest introductions to Botany 
upon record was pubUshed, in four pages folio, by 
Leonhart Fuchs, a learned physician of Tubingen. 
At that period Botany was nothing more than the 
art of distinguishing one plant from another, and 
of remembering the medical qualities, sometimes real, 
but more frequently imaginary, which experience, or 
error, or superstition, had ascribed to them. Little 
was known of Vegetable Physiology, nothing of Vege- 
table Anatomy, and even the mode of arranging 
species systematically had still to be discovered ; 
while scarcely a trace existed of those modern views 
which have raised the science from the mere business 
of the herb-gatherer to a station among the most in- 
tellectual branches of natural philosophy. 
It now comprehends a knowledge not only of the 
names and uses of plants, but of their external and 
internal organisation, and of their anatomy and phy- 
siological phenomena: it embraces a consideration 
of the plan upon which those multitudes of vegetable 
forms that clothe the earth have been created, of the 
skilful combinations out of which so many various 
organs have emanated, of the laws that regulate the 
dispersion and location of species, and of the influ- 
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