PREFACE. 
The Florist’s Journal was projected for the express 
purpose of supplying a desideratum in floral literature, 
which had long been apparent to the proprietors and the 
conductor, and complained of by the most eminent profes¬ 
sional florists. There was no periodical at a moderate 
price, the general principles explained in which had any 
claim to philosophy, or consistency with nature ; the practical 
directions were, in no case, the bond fide productions of first- 
rate cultivators, or the illustrations directly taken from 
first-rate flowers, and faithfully represented. On the con¬ 
trary, the cheaper journals were mere gatherings of scraps, 
of no great value individually, and useless as a whole, from 
the want of connexion and bearing upon any general 
principle. They were, in fact, the mere bodies of journals 
without any spirit; and thus the purchasers of them just 
looked at the pictures, and then laid them aside. Nor 
could it well be otherwise; for not one of them could 
possibly have originated from a desire to improve the art; 
and so badly were some of the editors qualified for their 
duties, that, in a holograph letter by one of them, now 
lying before us, there is not one grammatical sentence, or 
any two sentences which have the least logical connexion. 
Then, the illustrations were just what the parties could get, 
and how they could get them; and truly they represented 
a new floral world, as different from Nature’s own Flora as 
can well be imagined. Even this was not all, nor the worst. 
Men of ignorant or ill-trained minds are always prone to 
fall into idolatry of some kind or other ; and so the parties 
under consideration contrived to set up a whole pantheon of 
Josses , some of them most whimsical ones. One, for in¬ 
stance, worshipped the writings of some man of name, for 
no apparent reason, other than that nobody could under- 
