This textbook was originally published in 1870, but is here reissued in the third edition of 1884. Its object was 'to supply students and field-botanists with a fuller account of the Flowering Plants and Vascular Cryptograms of the British Islands than the manuals hitherto in use aim at giving'. Sir Joseph Dalton Hooker (1817–1911), one of the most eminent botanists of the later nineteenth century, was educated at Glasgow, and developed his studies of plant life through expeditions all over the world. (Several of his other works are also reissued in the Cambridge Library Collection.) A close friend and supporter of Charles Darwin, he was appointed to succeed his father as Director of the Botanical Gardens at Kew in 1865. The flora is followed in this reissue by an 1879 catalogue of British plants compiled by the botanist George Henslow (1835–1925), intended as a companion volume.