British Flowering Plants

Abstract

LORD AVEBURY has given us in the past several delightful books on botanical subjects, dealing more especially with the forms and functions of leaves, flowers, and fruits. At the time when the earlier of these books were published there was a tendency to reduce botanical morphology to a cut-and-dried series of shapes and forms, each designated by a Latin name the correctness of which received more attention than the purpose served by the various modifications. In “Flowers, Fruits, and Leaves,” and “British Wild Flowers in Relation to Insects,” Sir John Lubbock adopted the more natural treatment of studying form in the light of function, with the result that on account of their broad conceptions and the appeal they made to the reasoning faculty, these books obtained a wide circulation, and even now they maintain their position among the foremost contributions to the subject. In the circumstances the author has drawn freely from his previous works in writing this volume, which is restricted to British plants, and contains shorter or longer references to all our flowering plants. It provides, therefore, a running commentary to British floras in general and to Bentham's “British Flora” in particular.