PREFACE. 
About three centuries have elapsed since one of 
the earliest introductions to Botany upon record was 
published, in four pages folio, by Leonhart Fuchs, a 
learned physician of Tubingen. At that period 
Botany was nothing more than the art of distin- 
guishing one plant from another, and of remem- 
bering 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 
Vegetable 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, their anatomy and physiolo- 
gical phenomena : it involves the consideration of 
the plan upon which those multitudes of vegetable 
forms that clothe the earth have been created, of the 
combinations out of which so many various organs 
have emanated, of the laws that regulate the dis- 
persion and location of species, and of the influence 
exercised by climate upon their developement ; and, 
lastly, from botany as now understood, in its most 
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