Excerpt from Handbook of the Amaryllideae Including the Alstroemerieae and Agaveae During the twenty-three years I have been at Kew I have made notes on the characters of all the Amaryllidew that have passed through my hands in a living state, and have had the opportunity of examining dried specimens of nearly all the species of the order. I have attempted in the present work to furnish cultivators and botanists with a compact working handbook, of which the main part consists of characters of the genera and species drawn up from actual specimens. I have not attempted to deal fully with the bibliography of the plants, or to trace out their pre-linnean history, or to say anything about their cultivation, or to deal, except very briefly, with the garden hybrids, which are so numerous in this order. For fuller information on these points I would refer those who wish for it to Parkinson's 'paradisus, ' Kunth's Enumeratio, ' Bentham Hooker's 'genera Plant arum, ' Herbert's 'amaryllidaceae' and his other writings, and the papers by Colonel Trevor Clarke in the 'gardeners' Chronicle' for 1878. I have referred in the body of the book to various other works, such as Burbidge's Narcissus' and Jacobi's 'agaveae, ' that deal specially with particular tribes and genera. Two out of Bentham's five tribes of the order, Hypoxidece and Vellosiece, have been dealt with recently elsewhere so fully that I have not thought it needful to include them here. The number of genera included is 61, and of species admitted about 670. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.