An Illustrated Flora Of The Northern United States Canada And The British Possessions From Newfoundland To The Parallel Of The Southern Boundary Of Virginia And From The Atlantic Ocean Westward To The 102d Meridian

Author : Nathaniel Lord Britton
Publisher :
ISBN 13 : 9781330675212
Total Pages : 630 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (752 download)

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Download or read book An Illustrated Flora of the Northern United States, Canada and the British Possesions, Vol. 1 of 3 written by Nathaniel Lord Britton and published by . This book was released on 2015-07-04 with total page 630 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Excerpt from An Illustrated Flora of the Northern United States, Canada and the British Possesions, Vol. 1 of 3: From Newfoundland to the Parallel of the Southern Boundary of Vir and From the Atlantic Ocean Westward to the 102d Meridian The present work is the first complete Illustrated Flora published in this country. Its aim is to illustrate and describe every species, from the Ferns upward, recognized as distinct by botanists and growing wild within the area adopted, and to complete the work within such moderate limits of size and cost as shall make it accessible to the public generally, so that it may serve as an independent handbook of our Northern Flora and as a work of general reference, or as an adjunct and supplement to the manuals of systematic botany in current use. To all botanical students, a complete illustrated manual is of the greatest service; always useful, often indispensable. The doubts and difficulties that are apt to attend the best written descriptions will often be instantly solved by figures addressed to the eye. The greatest stimulus, moreover, to observation and study, is a clear and intelligible guide; and among the aids to botanical enquiry, a complete illustrated handbook is one of the chief. Thousands of the lovers of plants, on the other hand, who are not botanists and are not familiar with botanical terms or the methods of botanical analysis, will find in the illustrations of a complete work the readiest means of comparison and identification of the plants that grow around them; and through the accompanying descriptions they will at the same time acquire a familiarity with botanical language. By these facilities, not only will the study of our native plants be stimulated and widened among all classes, but the enjoyment, the knowledge and the scientific progress derivable from these studies will he proportionately increased. Though most European countries have complete illustrations of the flora of their own territory, no similar work has hitherto been attempted here. Our illustrated works, some of them of great value, have been either sumptuous and costly monographs, accessible to comparatively few, or confined to special groups of plants, or have been works of a minor and miscellaneous character, embracing at most but a few hundred selected species, and from incompleteness, therefore, unsuited for general reference. Scarcely one-quarter of the species illustrated in the present work have ever been figured before. That no such general work has been previously attempted is to be ascribed partly, perhaps, to the imperfect exploration of our territory, and the insufficiency of the collections to enable such a work to be made approximately complete; partly to the great number of species required to be figured and the consequent difficulty and cost of the undertaking, and partly to the lack of any apparent demand for such a work sufficient to warrant the expense of the enterprise. The increased accumulations of material in our largest herbaria, the result of multiplied explorations, and the widely extended interest in the study of our native plants, seem now to justify the endeavor to supply a complete illustrated work adapted to general use. The enterprise, projected by Judge Brown, and maintained and supervised by him throughout, has been diligently prosecuted for the past six years. Its execution has been mainly the work of Dr. Britton. The text, founded upon a careful examination of living or herbarium specimens, has been chiefly prepared by him, with the assistance, however, of specialists in a few groups who have contributed the descriptions for certain families as stated in the footnotes. The figures also have been drawn by artists under his immediate supervision; except those of most of the grasses, drawn by Mr. Holm, under the eye of Prof. Scribner; while the work in all its parts has been carefully revised by both authors. The keys to the genera and spec.