VI PREFACE. 
most improved form that he had given to his system, a re- 
markably complete and excellent Flora of Britain. Then 
followed the long-continued separation of this country from 
France, and indeed from most of the European nations, by 
which we were almost completely prevented from obser- 
ving the progress which botanical science was making in 
other countries, and at the same time our own flora was 
continually receiving accessions of new plants which it was 
nearly impossible to identify with the species detected and 
published in France and Germany. At the conclusion of 
the War we had become so wedded to the system of Lin- 
naeus, and it may even perhaps be allowable to add, so well 
satisfied with our own proficiency, that, with the honour- 
able exception of Mr. Brown, there was at that time scarcely 
a botanist in Britain who took any interest or paid the 
least attention to the classification by Natural Orders which 
had been adopted in France, and to the more minute and 
accurate examination of plants which was caused by the 
employment of that philosophical arrangement. Let it not 
however be supposed that the author wishes at all to de- 
tract from the value of the Linnaean system — a system 
which was considered by its author as merely a provisional 
arrangement or kind of index to the known plants ; for no 
botanist has more strongly stated the value of a natural 
classification than Linnaeus himself, — as he fully believes 
that without some such artificial scheme by which newly 
discovered plants could be catalogued for easy reference, 
the multitudinous species which distant countries have sup- 
plied would long since have formed so enormous and con- 
fused a mass as to have reduced botany to a state little 
better than that into which it had fallen at the commence- 
ment of the Linnaean era. 
The publication of so complete and valuable a Linnaean 
work as the English Flora greatly contributed to the per- 
manency of this feeling, and accordingly we find that at a 
very recent period working English botanists were unac- 
quainted with any of the more modern continental floras, 
and indeed even now many of those works are only known 
by name to the great mass of the cultivators of British 
botany. 
In the present work it has been the Author's endeavour 
to adopt in all cases those names which have the claim of 
priority, unless good cause could be shown for a contrary 
