ign to the natural organisation.

The practical applications of teratology deserve the attention of those
cultivators who are concerned in the embellishment of our gardens and
the supply of our tables. The florist lays down a certain arbitrary
standard of perfection, and attempts to make flowers conform to that
model. Whether it be in good taste or not to value all flowers, in
proportion as they accord with an artificial and comparatively inelastic
standard of this kind, we need not stop to enquire; suffice it to say,
that taking the matter in its broadest sense, the aim of the florist is
to produce large, symmetrical flowers, brightly and purely coloured, or
if parti-coloured, the colours must be distinct, harmonious, or
contrasted. When all this is done, the flower, in most instances,
becomes 'monstrous' of the eyes in the botanist, though all the more
interesting to the student of morphology on that account. In like manner
the double flowers, the "breaks," the "sports" which the florist
cultivates so anxiously, are all of them greater or less deviations from
the ordinary form, while the broccolies, the cabbages, and many other
products of our kitchen gardens and fields owe the estimation in which
they are held entirely to those peculiarities which, by an unhappy
application of words, are called monstrous by botanists. Grafting,
layering, the "striking" of cuttings, the formation of adventitious
roots and buds, processes on which the cultivator so greatly relies for
the propagation and extension of his plants, are also matters with which
teratology concerns itself. Again the difficulty experienced
occasionally in getting vines, strawberries, &c., to set properly, may
sometimes be accounted for by that inherent tendency which some plants
possess of exchanging an hermaphrodite for a unisexual condition.

For reasons then of direct practical utility, no less than on purely
scientific grounds, it is desirable to study these irregularities of
growth, their nature, limits, and inducing causes; and to this end it is
hoped the present work may, in some degree, contribute.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] An excellent summary of the history of Vegetable Teratology is given
in Kirschleger's 'Essai historique de la Teratologie Vegetale,'
Strasburg, 1845.

[2] In some instances diagrams and formulae are given in explanation of
the conformation of monstrous flowers; in general these require no
further explanation than is given in the text, u