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.[1]
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-
- ↑ Thus De Candolle's fragmentary "Systema" is not quoted for plants subsequently included in his universally used "Prodromus;" nor Boissier's inaccessible "Diagnoses Plantarum Orientalium" for those subsequently included in his great work, the "Flora Orientalis." The interposition of a semicolon between the author's name and that of the work cited, indicates that the plant was not first described in that work; its absence indicates that it was.
With regard to the vexed question, whether to attach to a species the name of the author who first described it, or of him who first put it into the genus to which I think that it belongs, I have adopted the latter alternative, chiefly on the principle that a right comprehension of genera is of higher importance than the power of describing a species. The number of species described by authors who cannot determine their affinities, increases annually, and I regard the naturalist who puts a described plant into its proper position in regard to its allies, as rendering a greater service to science than its describer, when he either puts it into a wrong place, or throws it into any of those chaotic heaps miscalled genera, with which systematic works still abound. I however admit, that no laws or usages embrace all cases of disputed authority or priority, and that the best hitherto proposed are open to great abuses ; but after many years' experience I find that the plan which, in common with the majority of botanists, I have followed, is open to the fewest objections, and does justice to the greatest and most deserving number of naturalists.
