PREFACE A still more popular edition of what has proved to the author to be a surprisingly popular book, has been prepared by the able hand of Mr. Ma Don Dickinson, and is now offered in the hope that many more people will find the wild flowers in Nature's garden all about us well worth knowing. For flowers have distinct objects in life and are everything they are for the most justifiable of reasons, _i.e._, the perpetuation and the improvement of their species. The means they employ to accomplish these ends are so various and so consummately clever that, in learning to understand them, we are brought to realize how similar they are to the fundamental aims of even the human race. Indeed there are few life principles that plants have not worked out satisfactorily.
