of great beauty and of deep tones of colour-in this delightful season: not the almost perennial flowers that open on from spring to summer, from summer to Autumn, and far into winter, nor the

vigorous flowers which, coming with the early summer, attain their full splendour in July and August, and linger on into the first few days of September; but the veritable blossoms of Autumn which come with the season and remain open until cut down by the early frosts of winter. Yet these, beautiful as they are and conspicuous, in places, by their abundant presence, appear to be obliterated by the more pervading hues of autumnal leafage.

Content, so to speak, to suffer by comparison, during the summer-whilst they are dressed in their garb of sober green-with the flowers which they bear and serve by contrast to bring into relief, the leaves, in the later season, change colour, and when their early ornaments are faded and gone, blossom, themselves, into tints of mellow beauty, and oftentimes into hues of splendour which enrich the landscape as far as the eye can

see.

Pencil and pallet have been industriously employed, since landscape art first commenced to copy Nature, in the work of delineating on paper and canvas the especial, prominent, or typical

features of the seasons; and in this work of reproduction Autumn has been fully represented. Photographic skill has, too, been brought into play-and with marvellous and increasing success -to delineate the scenes of Nature in fac-simile, and when it shall have succeeded, as it seems not unlikely that it will, ere long, in reproducing not merely the forms but the colours of natural objects, it will have left little else for the landscape painter but imaginative subjects, or imaginative combinations of effects,' which it may not be in the power of photography to compass. If 'high art'-as art-should then suffer, it will merely be another instance of the triumph of science and Nature over mere art.

6

Meanwhile we depend, mostly, for our coloured pictures upon the artist and designer.

Yet

though these have provided us plentifully with coloured flowers we have had few leaves, and those which have been drawn for us have been summer leaves. If we look into books we shall find an abundance of coloured representations of blossoms with green leaves added to make pleasant contrast. But in this country, coloured

representations of autumnal leaves have never, to the Author's knowledge, been attempted in books, and even the subject itself has not been dealt with except in verse and in a fragmentary way in prose.

But it is full of suggestiveness and beauty, and it has long been the Author's desire to endeavour to give especial prominence to it. How few people take the trouble to study in detail the exquisite conformations of leaves ! The fact that the summer leaf is green and the autumnal leaf is yellow, or red, or orange, is the only fact of which especial cognizance is taken. The prominent and conspicuous circumstances of form or colour being roughly noted, the subject is dismissed from sight and from mind. It was in the endeavour to increase the popular appreciation of the beautiful forms of leaves that the Author determined upon the especial character of the coloured illustrations of 'OUR WOODLAND TREES.' In these it was attempted-for the first time, he believes, in the history of colour printing-to give a careful representation of the characteristic venation of each leaf. The outlines of form were

obtained by the only absolutely exact methodnamely by the employment of photography. The artist who undertook the work of filling in the details of venation performed his task with admirable fidelity; the lithographers coloured after Nature. Actual leaves which had been carefully collected by the Author-with their forms and colouring preserved-formed the subjects for draughtsman and colour-printer, and the result was all that the Author could have wished in fulfilment of his design. Amongst many gratifying acknowledgments of the pleasure which this species of Nature-printing gave to the readers of his book, he wishes to refer to one received from an Australian correspondent, who, writing from Melbourne in June 1879, said,- Having just finished reading "OUR WOODLAND TREES," I feel under such a strong sense of personal obligation. to you that I write to thank you even from this distance. ... I am sure your writings, especially this last work, will awaken, or rather originate, a new and most charming æsthetic cultus-the loving study of trees-a subject on which there is the most lamentable ignorance. It is pitiable to