This additional call on the business of the press, as well as upon the talent of the artist, arises from the fashionable and refined bias of the public taste for this rational and delightful study. To extend botanical collections, and the desire to possess every vegetable beauty, pervaded the whole community: hence expeditions to distant lands by collectors; hence the extension and encouragement of nursery business; hence have sprung up chartered societies and associations for the encouragement of botany and gardening all over the realm; so that vegetable beauties and curiosities are now to be seen in British collections, from every region of the known world. Neither has the occult subject of botanical physiology been neglected; many curious facts connected with the organisation, structure, functions, and qualities of plants, have been ascertained: but still there remains much for the employment of the naturalist’s mind on this difficult subject. Landscape gardening is not so much “the rage” as it was twenty or thirty years ago: national circumstances, perhaps, may be the cause; but its principles are much better understood. The errors of Kent and Brown, and their followers, have been corrected by the works and writings of Repton, and the critiques of Knight and Price, whose theories have been [p271] carried into practice by Loudon and others; and nothing will prevent the universal adoption of their principles, but the difficulty of giving the foreground from _home walks_ the extreme degree of ruggedness so much admired, and even indispensable to the painter. Fern, (unless we can introduce some uncommon foreign variety,) burdock, kexes, cannot be admitted into dressed ground; nor have we any plants in cultivation which would well answer the purpose; true, we have the rhubarb, one or two sorts of thistles, eryngiums, palma Christi, and gourds with their ample leaves: but these would only appear intruders, and misplaced: but much may be done by a judicious disposition of our common shrubs, so as to conceal the traces of the spade and line, and give all our combinations of land, wood, and water that flowing character, which is so true to nature, and so pleasing to the refined eye of taste. Floriculture, which has been imported from France and Holland, is also intensely followed about London, as well as in our manufacturing provinces. Authors have creditably appeared in this line too; and our annual blows of flowers, both home-cultivated and imported, are at once rich and costly. Tulips, hyacinths, narcissuses, ranunculuses, and anemones, are the principal bed flowers: but roses, stocks, dahlias, chrysanthemums, and even poppies, are out of number. Flowering shrubs, both within and without doors, are eminently rich and various, and astonish as much by the splendour of their colours as by their elegant forms and number.