And so we
turn the leaf, and come to the DEDICATION.
The Dedication of a work like this, destined to preserve all the
names it enrols in the sculpture-like immortality of science,
naturally delays us for a moment. Of the foreign teacher and friend
to whom the author owes some of his earliest lessons, and of that
group of our own citizens, most of them still living, who lent their
united efforts to the enterprise of publication after it was
commenced, we need not speak individually. But we cannot pass over
the name of FRANCIS CALLEY GRAY without a word of grateful
remembrance for one who was the friend and adviser of the author
in planning the publication of the work before us. We who remember
his varied culture, his large and fluent discourse, with its
formidable accuracy of knowledge and gracious suavity of utterance,
his taste in literature and art, which made his home a suite of
princely cabinets, his generous and elegant hospitality, which
scholars and artists knew so well,--counting him as the peer, and in
many points the more than peer of such as the wide world of letters
is proud to claim,--are pleased to see that his cherished name will
be read by the students of unborn generations on the first leaf of
this noble record of the science of our own.
The PREFACE which follows the Dedication is full of grateful
acknowledgments to the many friends of science, in all parts of the
country, who came forward to lend their aid in various forms,
especially in collecting and transmitting specimens from the
most widely remote sections of the continent.
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