Page:The Flora of British India Vol 1.djvu/13

Rh avoidance of repetition in the descriptions and remarks on each species, will enable me to compress the whole into a portable form.

With regard to citations of previous works, and references to authors, these have been reduced to what appears to be most useful and desirable for working and especially Indian botanists. As a rule, all Indian Floras are quoted, as also the work wherein the species was first described under the name it bears; the chief exceptions to the latter are in cases where the author has redescribed the plant in a subsequent better known general work, when the latter alone is cited.

I have been compelled to confine the citations of numbered distributed collections to Wallich's; to have introduced the numbers of Wight's, Jacquemont's, Hohenacker's, Strachey and Winterbottom's, Griffith's, Falconer's, Heifer's, Maingay's, Thwaites's, Hooker fil. and Thomson's, and other collections that have been distributed from Kew and elsewhere, would have added at least another volume to the work, and would have prolonged indefinitely the time and cost of its production. All such references, if not checked in the proofs, as well as in the MS., are sure to abound in errors; as do indeed the collections themselves, requiring- in such cases the introduction of cross references, discussions and critical notes, essential for the verification of specimens, but not necessarily of species. More-