These little essays originally appeared as articles in ‘Longman’s Magazine,’ the ‘Cornhill Magazine,’ ‘Macmillan’s Magazine,’ the ‘Gentleman’s Magazine,’ and ‘Belgravia,’ and I have to thank the editors and proprietors of those periodicals for kind permission to reprint them here. They are now offered to the public as a first instalment of a work which I hope some day more fully to carry out — a Functional Companion to the British Flora. We know by this time pretty well what our English wild flowers are like: we want to know next why they are just what they are, and how they came to be so.
G. A.
Lyme, Dorset:
July 1883.