Excerpt from The Ferns and Fern Allies of New Zealand: With Instructions for Their Collection and Hints on Their Cultivation; With Five Plates The demand for a compendious and handy description of the Ferns of New Zealand has led to the publication of more than one little work on the subject; but from one cause or another these books have rapidly passed out of print, so that the collector - desirous of identifying the plants he obtains - is obliged to consult Hooker's "Handbook of the New Zealand Flora," a work which is too general in its outline for his purposes, and which is already somewhat out of date. To satisfy this demand, the author has been led to prepare this small manual, in the hope that it will meet the requirements of the case and will prove to be longer-lived and of more lasting value than its predecessors. The usual demand in such a work is that it shall be written in a "popular" style and in "popular" language - in other words, that all technical terms shall be avoided in descriptions. Books of this class are in the majority of cases unsatisfactory, usually lacking that scientific accuracy which is the first requirement of such works, but chiefly being defective in conciseness of description and exactness of phraseology. They fail to satisfy those who want scientific descriptions, and are not sufficiently explicit for those who have little knowledge of the subjects treated of. A large technical vocabulary has grown up round the literature of ferns, which it is impossible to ignore altogether. No one can lay claim to a knowledge of these plants without knowing something also of this terminology; for it is impossible to examine ferns without finding characters and points of structure which our ordinary vocabulary fails to describe aptly. There is hardly any pursuit or study which has not a terminology of its own, and the student of ferns will find that there is such a terminology in his branch, and that it has to be mastered before he can make satisfactory progress in the identification of species. 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.