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Excerpt from The Tourist's Flora: A Descriptive Catalogue of the Flowering Plants and Ferns of the British Islands, France, Germany, Switzerland, Italy, and the Italian Islands The intention of the present work is to enable the lover of botany to determine the names of any wild plants he may meet with, when journeying in the British Islands, France, Germany, Switzerland, and Italy. I have chosen these limits, as those of the countries most frequented by English tourists, and with the botany of which I was in some degree personally acquainted. To have extended them further, would have made my book more bulky, and, I am afraid, more imperfect. To accomplish this object, I had to keep in view two important particulars, - to make the descriptions clear and distinctive, and at the same time to condense the whole as much as possible, so that the work might be comprised in a single volume, of a bulk not inconvenient for the use of the traveller. The former object I have used no small pains to attain; in the first place by taking care, if by any means I could accomplish it, that my characters should always contain a difference at least sufficient to discriminate the plant from all others contained in this work. To this end I have been in the habit, in a the larger genera, of forming for myself an analysis of the genus; taking successively the most important characters, and dividing and subdividing upon them, till I arrived at the species. Where I could not succeed in this, I have taken each species in order, and compared it with those that follow; desirous that some character, good or bad, should serve to mark some sort of distinction. I have not found this always practicable, even in species derived from the same author; much less in those only noticed by different authors. In such cases, I have contented myself with translating the words of my author, and giving them as a quotation, with the writers name at the end. Where the inverted commas therefore occur, they show, either that the description does not appear to point out any satisfactory distinction, or that there are parts of it which I do not fully understand, or that I do not feel confident that the plant does not occur under another name in other authors, or, lastly, that I doubt whether the plant be the one described by other authors under the same name. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.