The frontispiece to our Volume for 1885, represents the Author of " Suburban Home Grounds," one of those standard works on American Landscape Gardening, which has done honor to our country and for which lovers of American Gardening will ever feel grateful. This beautiful book was issued by D. Appleton & Co. in 1869, in a large octavo of 600 pages, and reached three editions. Why it has been allowed to get "out of print" since, is one of the mysteries no one has yet explained. The preparation of that work commenced as a labor of love. The author went personally over every part of the United States where he could hear of a fine tree, a fine garden, or fine garden architecture, and embodied the work of his pen and pencil in this superb book.

Frank J. Scott was born in Columbia, South Carolina, 1828, but his parents emigrated to Ohio in 1830, and the son was reared on the Maumee, at Perrysburg, Maumee and Toledo, where he was instructed as well as their good schools afforded, but much better perhaps by an exceptionally intelligent father. There were no Prangs in those days to introduce drawing into school systems. His love for the pencil was natural, and it became noted among the boys and girls for its attempts on portraits and natural scenery. As early as twenty, one he became enamored of landscape gardening and rural architecture, and in 1852 was engaged by a gentleman in Toledo to lay out a large block, which is yet considered the best specimen of gar-denesque work in Toledo. In order to still further excel in this beautiful art, he spent a summer as student with the celebrated Andrew Jackson Downing, at Newburg, on the Hudson, and another with Downing and Vaux, this firm having taken in general architecture with landscape gardening.

A year and a half was then spent among the famous old buildings, parks, and gardens of Europe, and on his return he established himself in his profession at Toledo. But the field seemed too poor for his ambition to excel, and he relinquished the attempt for that of a dealer in real estate.

In 1866, while busy in the improvement of a modest suburban house, he became impressed with the need of just such a work as finally culminated in the production of the beautiful book to which we have just referred. In 1859 he made a trip to South America, and in Chili met with the lady whom he had known in Paris, who was henceforth to be his partner for life, and where he was married in 1860.

Mr. Scott's father took a great interest in the establishment of a university in Toledo, and the son entered warmly into his father's project, and 1873 was spent in Europe studying the schools of art and trade in order to work these branches into the regular university plan. There is no place for the magnificent gardens and palaces of the old world in connection with the private citizen in our country, and yet these famous works of art are great educators. Mr. Scott's idea always has been to make our schools and colleges their counterparts here.

Studies in political economy and general literature have somewhat drawn our author from the tasks he has shown himself so well fitted to accomplish. The biographies of eminent men in the American edition of "Chambers' Encyclopaedia" are from his pen, and more recently the banking system of America has secured his attention in the North American Review; but as he has not yet reached "three-score," there is time enough left for him to return to his early love.

Since the above was sent to press, we have the following additional notes supplied by a friend more intimately acquainted with the work of Mr. Scott than the writer of this :

"Mr. S. has been much of a traveler, having been twice in Europe, in California, the Rocky Mountain country, South America and the Hawaiin Islands. Since 1879 much of his time in summer, has been spent in Utah and Idaho Territories. In the latter, in 1880, his explorations in a mining region just opened among the lofty Saw Tooth Mountains of Central Idaho resulted in the publication by him of the first approximately correct map that had ever been made of the sources of four of the principal rivers of that Territory, two of which had before been represented on the government maps of that Territory as sixty miles away from where Mr. Scott located their sources.

" During the last twelve years the following essays from his pen show the direction of his thinking : 'The Palaces of America,' published in the Radical Review, of Boston, in 1873; 'Suggestions Concerning a National Currency,' the same year; ' National Works,' a plea for the Erie Canal to become a National and free canal, to be controlled by the United States, 1877; 'Pictures on Grass,' and editing a paper, in 1878; ' Property without a Price,' 1879; a very considerable portion of the biographical and monetary articles in the American addition to ' Chambers' Encyclopaedia,' published by John B. Alden.of New York, in 1882, under the title of 'The Library of Useful Knowledge;" and the same year a lecture on the 'National Banking System,' read in New York city in 1881, and recently condensed in part for the North American Review; essays on 'Progress in Suffrage' and 'Climates," read before clubs in Toledo within the past two years, are among the later papers that have appeared as occasion, and not a literary profession, called them out.

His beautiful book. 'Suburban Home Grounds,' is about to be issued again under the title of ' Beautiful Homes,' by J. B. Alden & Co., of New York".