PREFACE.

In the winter, water freezes into ice and snow falls, even in the southern regions; this occurs especially, however, in those areas further to the north, and certain mountains are scarcely ever free from their perennial snow throughout the entire year.

Storms are very common here, and there are scarcely three months in the year in which they do not rage most violently. The changes original: "vicissitudines" of the air in these lands are extremely inconstant. Rain falls almost the entire year, as much as could ever be sufficient, but especially in the spring and summer months; it is this copious rain that is the cause of Japan's extreme fertility. Thunder is not rare, while storms and earthquakes are most common.

The entire kingdom consists of almost nothing but mountains, both small and great, so that one sees only hills and valleys where there are fields, but never meadows. The soil itself here is for the most part clay-like and sometimes, in certain places, more sandy; it is, however, less fertile by its own nature than it is rendered by the tireless and incredible labors of the natives.

THE OPPORTUNITY FOR VISITING JAPAN AND COLLECTING PLANTS THERE.

I owe the opportunity of visiting a land so remote and difficult to access chiefly to the illustrious Professor Burman Johannes Burman (1707–1779), a Dutch botanist and physician who was a friend of Linnaeus., who is celebrated far and wide for his most elegant botanical writings and his most successful medical practice. For it was he who, while I was in foreign—