PREFACE
J ■
I n the volumes, issued by our Acclimation Society from 1871 to
1875, four contributions have appeared, concerning such industrial
plants as are available for culture in this colony. These writings
were mainly offered with a view of promoting the introduction
and diffusion of the very many kinds of plants, which in our
geographic latitudes may be extensively reared in forests, on
fields or pastures. The prints, thus originated, became however
accessible merely to the members of the Society, while frequent
calls arose for these or some similar data throughout our
community. The whole has therefore now been reissued in a
rearranged and largely supplemented form as a departmental
publication with ministerial approval. As stated in *the preface
to the original essays, they do not claim completeness either
as a specific index or as a series of notes on the respective
technologic applicability of the plants enumerated. But what
these writings perhaps may aspire to is the aim of bringing together
closely-arrayed some condensed notes in popular language
on all the principal utilitarian plants hitherto known to prosper
in extra-tropic zones. Information of this kind is widely scattered
through many and often voluminous works in several languages,
yet such volumes treating perhaps on countries with a climatic
zone far more narrow than ours. Only a share of the books,
which it was desirable to consult, were a t my command, hence the
necessity of successive further supplements, even irrespective of