in many parks and pleasure grounds in the counties watered by the Thames and Severn ? If our book serves no other purpose than to put on record the trees of the past, and to show what England has produced and may produce again if the conditions allow it, it will have fulfilled the main object with which it was written. But I hope and believe that it also may save a great waste of public and private money caused by plant¬ ing the wrong trees in the wrong places, and from depending on the often ignorant and self-interested advice of men who call themselves experts but really know very little of the subject. Such men are happily not so commnon as they were, but, though most tree planters will have to buy their experience by failures, I can only hope that they will not buy it so dearly as I have done.
But however numerous the failures may be, there is no doubt that tree planting in England has entered on a period of growing interest and activity, and that the knowledge which is now available, but which our ancestors had not got, may enable us to depend less on German nursery¬ men for their seed supplies, and less on foreign imports for our timber, and if this is so I shall believe that I have not lived in vain. My great regret is that the necessary cost of the book makes it beyond the means of many who would probably make more use of it than a good many subscribers who took it more for the interest of the illustrations than for the letterpress.
Notwithstanding the fact that I have not spent a shilling on advertising, or given away a single Press copy for review, I have been pleased and surprised to find that our book has much more than covered the expenses of its publication, and that instead of falling in value as is too often the case with costly illustrated works of this character, it is now nearly out of print and sells at auction for more than the subscription price, Another very satisfactory feature has been the almost total absence of bad debts. It is true that I never asked anyone to take it who did not really want it, and that my sole agent for its sale through booksellers at home and abroad has been the great house of Quaritch, yet it must always be a satisfaction to any author to know that he has given something to his subscribers which is worth as much as or more than it cost.
