A lovely copy of this scarce botanical primer.
After a moralising introduction positioning the study of botany as a means to avoid vice, the text itself is comprised of thirteen dialogues exchanged as a group of children walk through the English countryside.
They consider various topics such as ranunculi, cruciform flowers, umbellate plants, nettles, peas, drying plants for herbaria, grasses, and even oxygen. They’re not just focused on English botany per se, but there’s also a chapter on Lapland and Siberia. The final chapter, bringing everything together, is an “Explanation of the Linnaean System.”
The text is inspired in part from Rousseau’s Letters on the Elements of Botany, which first appeared in English in 1785.
Gumuchian, 5869; Osborne, 216.
