PREFACE. 
HE following extracts from the preface to the first 
X edition will serve to indicate the general inception 
and the scope of the work. 
“The aim with which I commenced, nearly seven years 
ago, to prepare this book, was to supply within a reasonable 
compass, a summary of useful and scientific information 
about the plants met with in a botanical garden or museum, 
or in the field. The student, when placed before the 
bewildering variety of forms in such a collection as that 
at Kew, does not know where to begin or what to do.... The 
available works of general reference are mostly very bulky 
and often out of date, and as a rule refer only to systematic 
or economic botany, and say nothing about morphology or 
natural history. I have endeavoured to bring together in 
this book as much information as is required by any but 
specialists, upon all plants usually met with, and upon all 
those points — morphology, classification, natural history, 
economic botany, &c. — which do not require the use of a 
microscope. 
“ The principal part of the book consists of a dictionary 
in which the whole of the families and the important genera 
of flowering plants and ferns are dealt with. The families 
are treated very fully, more so than in any ordinary text- 
i 
