Page:Britishwildflowe00sowe.djvu/36

xxiv artificial arrangement, like that adopted in the accompanying Key, becomes necessary, to enable the unscientific student to discover the order to which any plant he may meet with in the fields is to be referred. The characters given, referring only to the plants of the order or genus indigenous to this country, are as simple as possible, and will probably enable the reader to find readily the description and figure of any native plant in the work.

The space allotted to the descriptive portion of our book is so small, that it has been impossible to give in many instances one sufficient, alone, for the perfect identification of the plant; and the aim has been rather to add those characteristics not clearly shown in the figure, and which are most easily recognized, than those by which the species is accurately determined by the botanist: in many cases three or four lines would have been necessary to give such characters as would enable the student to determine the species without the aid of the figure, when one line of description only could be admitted; the descriptions must therefore be considered only subordinate to the plates. The normal habitat of each plant is given, together with the general height above the ground, its duration, time of flowering, and the colour of the flower; the height and colour are, however, in most cases very variable. The fraction at the end of the description denotes the scale upon which the flower is drawn in the plate—usually one-half or two-thirds the natural size: the size of the flower, however, is likewise subject to much variation; where no scale is given, the figure is the natural size. The works to which references are made, are the 1st edition of the 'English Botany,' by Sowerby and Smith; the 2nd edition of the same work by Sowerby and Johnson; the 7th edition of Hooker and Arnott's 'British Flora;' the 4th edition of Babington's 'Manual of British Botany;' and Lindley's 'Synopsis of the British Flora.'