In a book like the present, the work of a large number of distinct contributors, it is evident that no continuous or homogeneous treatment of the history and progress of Botany in this country is possible. Judged even as a series of essays or studies of representative men, _The Makers of British Botany_ will not escape criticism, so long as special reference to the work of Priestley, Cavendish and Sénébier finds no place in its pages, not to mention such obvious omissions as Knight, Daubeny and Bentham. These omissions have not been deliberate and it will no doubt be possible to repair them should a second edition of the work be called for. The case of Charles Darwin is different. Apart from the work for which he is most famous, Darwin was a great investigator of the movements of plants and of the biology of flowers. As this aspect of Darwin's work has received adequate treatment in the recent centenary volume published by the Cambridge University Press[1], it has not seemed necessary on the present occasion to traverse the ground again. * * * * * The reader of _The Makers of British Botany_ will judge, and we think rightly, that Botany has had its ups and downs in this country. At the end of the seventeenth century England was contributing her full share to the foundation and advancement of the subject. In the field of Systematic Botany Ray, at any rate, left his permanent influence as a taxonomist, whilst in Plant Anatomy, the offspring of the newly invented microscope, Grew divided the honours with his brilliant contemporary Malpighi. A few years later Stephen Hales was carrying out the famous experiments which are embodied in his _Vegetable Staticks_, entitling him to be justly regarded as the Father of plant physiology. Notwithstanding so admirable a beginning, the next century was almost a blank. The essay on John Hill serves to illustrate the sterility of this period. The dominant influence in Botany in the eighteenth century was that of Linnaeus, whose genius as a taxonomist gave the most wonderful impulse to the study of Botany that it has ever received. Shorn of its accumulated dead-weight of nomenclature, the simplified Botany of Linnaeus took deep root in this country and here for a century it reigned supreme as a source of inspiration. Fed on unlimited collections of plants from all parts of a growing Empire, it is hardly surprising that a great British school of Systematic Botany led by Robert Brown, the Hookers, Lindley and Bentham should have arisen. What is remarkable is the almost exclusive persistence of this branch of Botany for more than a generation after the establishment and recognition of other departments on the continent of Europe. Whilst we made a shrine for the Linnaean collections, so far as we were concerned Grew and Hales might never have lived; even the rational and scientific morphology created by Hofmeister in the forties of last century failed to deflect us from our course!