35 
POSTSCRIPT. 
The foregoing preliminary treatise was prepared for the 
press last year, but was delayed for the purpose of instituting 
a particular investigation of the Narcissi and someotherplants 
of which specimens could not be then obtained, and it would 
have been more satisfactory to myself to have delayed this 
work longer. I have, however, now had the advantage of look- 
ing into Dr. Lindley’s second edition of a Natural System of 
Botany, a work of exceeding great value, which I hope will 
reach many editions, and be improved till it shall ultimately 
exhibit that distinct view of the vegetable creation which in 
the foregoing pages I was desirous of exciting him to pro- 
duce. I observe with great pleasure at the commencement 
of the volume what is there termed an artificial analysis of 
the orders, in which the faulty system of a limited number 
of subdivisions is abandoned, and the successive grades of 
difference are set forth in the general manner I have sug- 
gested. It is termed an artificial analysis, as I conclude, 
because its author is conscious that it does not arrange the 
orders according to his own view of their affinities. He may 
be, however, assured that, if such be the case, it is not because 
such an analysis is necessarily repugnant to the most impor- 
tant affinities of nature, but because the principal points have 
either not been duly set forth, or have not obtained the 
precedence they deserved. It is impossible that any man 
should, at the first, bring such an arrangement to perfection. 
It is much to have begun the work, and to have produced 
an analysis which is of infinite value, both from the clear 
view which it presents and the facilities it offers for effecting 
a more perfect arrangement. What remains is to examine 
carefully how the points assumed and arranged therein sepa- 
rate orders that ought to be approximated, and to see how 
either by arranging those points in a different order of prece- 
dence, or by the assumption of other points, the analysis can 
be made to exhibit a more natural view of the concatenation 
n 2 
