Pharmacographia, the word which gives the title to this book, indicates the nature of the work to which it has been prefixed. The term means simply a writing about drugs ; and it has been selected not without due consideration, as in itself distinctive, easily quoted, and intelligible in many languages. Pharmacographia, in its widest sense, embodies and expresses the joint intention of the authors. It was their desire, not only to write upon the general subject, and to utilize the thoughts of others; but that the book which they decided to produce together should contain observations that no one else had written down. It is in fact a record of personal researches on the principal drugs derived from the vegetable kingdom, together with such results of an important character as have been obtained by the numerous workers on Materia Medica in Europe, India, and America. About the Author: Friedrich August Fluckiger (1828-1894) was a Swiss pharmacist, chemist and botanist. He was born in Langenthal, canton of Bern, on 15 May 1828 and died on 11 December 1894. Fluckiger studied chemistry at the University of Berlin (1845–47), afterwards teaching pharmacy classes in Solothurn. In 1850 he studied botany at the University of Geneva, followed by studies at the University of Heidelberg. He was the author of the botanical name Boswellia sacra, a tree native to Somalia, Oman, and Yemen that is a major source of frankincense. Daniel Hanbury FRS (11 September 1825 –24 March 1875) was a British botanist and pharmacologist. He was an early student of pharmacognosy, the study of the medicinal applications of nature, principally of plants. Hanbury was born on 11 September 1825 in Clapham, at that time in Surrey, the eldest son of Daniel Bell Hanbury, a Quaker pharmacist, and his wife Rachel, née Christy. He went to Clapham Grammar School in 1833, and in 1841 started work at his father's firm, Allen & Hanbury's in the City of London. In 1857 he completed his training in pharmaceutical chemistry at the Pharmaceutical Society. He retired from business in 1870, and in 1874, in partnership with the Swiss botanist Friedrich August Flückiger, published his Pharmacographia. He died on 24 March 1875 in Clapham of typhoid fever, and was buried in the burial ground of the Society of Friends at Wandsworth.