[Illustration: _WILD SENNA: Cassia Marilandica._] WILD FLOWERS OF THE NORTH-EASTERN STATES BEING THREE HUNDRED AND EIGHT INDIVIDUALS COMMON TO THE NORTH-EASTERN UNITED STATES, DRAWN AND DESCRIBED FROM LIFE BY ELLEN MILLER AND MARGARET CHRISTINE WHITING ------ WITH THREE HUNDRED AND EIGHT ILLUSTRATIONS THE SIZE OF LIFE ------ G. P. PUTNAM’S SONS NEW YORK LONDON 27 WEST TWENTY-THIRD STREET 24 BEDFORD STREET, STRAND The Knickerbocker Press 1895 COPYRIGHT, 1895 BY G. P. PUTNAM’S SONS The Knickerbocker Press, New York Dedicated TO MARY GOODRICH WHITING AND MARY ESTHER MILLER INTRODUCTION. It was with no desire to compete with scientific botanies that this collection of flowers was gathered together, but with the hope of making their acquaintance more easy to non-scientific folk than the much condensed manuals of our flora are able to do. The opportunity of introducing a plant, with that graceful amplitude which forestalls human meetings, is denied to the scientific botanist by the needful restrictions of his formulæ, and there remain unnoted by him (because beyond the scope of a special terminology) numberless traits of race-habit, and personal details of growth belonging to the plants, to which the unlearned observer will attach a degree of significance, incommensurate, perhaps, to their scientific value. To the simple Nature-lover each growth possesses a personal quality more desirable than the catalogued facts of its existence, and which offers an invitation to his thought beyond the knowledge he may gain from books.