PREFACE. 
ix 
agriculture, the enclosure of wilds, and the opening of all 
accessible places to the feet and greedy bite of the ox and 
sheep, have exterminated many a native plant, and have 
limited the number of our rarities. The lover of insects, 
birds, and ferns, and the lover of landscape also, must cast 
many a fond regret over scenes once reckoned rife with trea¬ 
sures of beauty and interest; but now modernized into arable 
or grazing land, and made tributary to the market and rent- 
day. There are antiquities of Nature’s wildness, scarcely less 
deserving protection and preservation, than the antiquities of 
masonry in ruin; and if the country scenes of our land become 
destitute of all that is rustic, picturesque, and worthy of 
scientific research—if every hedgerow that ventures to luxuriate 
in a rose or honeysuckle, must be trimmed or levelled—if every 
marshy nook, rank with reed and sedge, and with their shelly 
and insect peoples, must be submitted to drainage, must be 
cleared, and be made to pay—then will the tendency of our 
population, now already too strong to gather into towns, and 
to abandon the open parts of the country, include, in self- 
defence, even those who love the country best; Nature must be 
studied in books, and museums, or in foreign lands; and our 
British Floras and Faunas will become historical records of 
what England once was, before this utilitarian age began. But 
if the lover of Ferns has much to fear from the plough, the 
draining-tile, and the axe, he has an equally dark prospect 
of desolation and annihilation before him, through the rapa¬ 
city of the modern Traders in Ferns. A bearded dealer in 
our Northern Fern-treasures visits the Southern counties, to 
present the bait of a host of captive Woodsia, stolen away 
from every known mountain home, and offered in exchange 
