Botanist

“ My young reader, do not imagine that I have any desire to underrate the merits of the scientific botanist. No, nothing of the sort. I am only desirous of bringing into the foreground a class of men whose services in my opinion the world has not yet sufficiently acknowledged—I mean the botanical collectors—the plant-hunters. ”

“ And yet this is the extent of most men’s botany; and it is more extensive than would at first be supposed. The botanist is startled by some countryman’s familiarity with an obscure plant to him rare and strange. He, who has been an observer for some years, knows not what it is, but the unobserving countryman, who sees nothing but what is thrust upon him, or the old woman who rarely goes out of the house, shows an easy familiarity with it and can call it by name. ”

“ Many of the peculiarities of plants, that fit them for existence, may be readily studied by the novice in botany as he tramps the fields in search of recreation. There is nothing more delightful and charming to the botanist than to seek the reasons for the beauties in Nature and to find why plants live and exist as they do. ”

“ A practised botanist will distinguish, at the first glance, the plants of different quarters of the globe, and yet will be at a loss to tell by what mark he detects them. There is, I know not what look,—sinister, dry, obscure in African plants ”

“ So a system of interchange of originals arose, which is now carried on between botanists all over the world. A trained and competent botanist who finds an opportunity to study the flora of regions which are little known may by this means become possessed of all the most instructive and remarkable plants that are known to science. ”

“ The botanist has here a great advantage; his specimens are easily obtained, are clean and wholesome, and can be dissected in a private house as well as anywhere else; and hence, I believe, the fact, that botany is so much more readily and better taught than its sister science. But, be it difficult or be it easy, if zoological science is to be properly studied, demonstration, and, consequently, dissection, must be had. Without it, no man can have a really sound knowledge of animal organization. ”

“ Can a mere knowledge of the external appearances of plants suffice? Certainly not,—for it is by tracing the minutiæ of Nature that we discover the mechanism of organized beings so ably contrived, and so beautifully displayed, and are enabled to form just ideas of the sublime works of the Great Artificer of the Universe. Is it not contended that a man cannot he a good Physician without he is conversant with Anatomy? And may it not he argued With equal propriety, that no person can he really a Botanist, unless he is acquainted with vegetable physiology? ”

“ Thus the humblest flower of the field, although, to one whose curiosity has not been excited, and whose understanding has, therefore, remained uninformed, it may appear worthless and contemptible, is valuable to the botanist, not only with regard to its place in the arrangement of this portion of the Creator’s works, but as it leads his mind forward to the consideration of those beautiful provisions for the support of vegetable life, which it is the part of the physiologist to study and to admire. ”

“ As much as possible, plants should be examined in the living state, or when freshly gathered. But dried specimens should be prepared for more leisurely examination and for comparison. To the working botanist good dried specimens are indispensable.
557. Botanical Specimens, to be complete, should have root or rootstock, stem, leaves, flowers, both open and in bud, and fruit. Sometimes these may all be obtained at one gathering; more commonly two or three gatherings at different times are requisite, especially for trees and shrubs. ”

“ In the earlier days of the science of botany nearly every botanist’s energies were devoted to this branch which we now call systematic botany. There are now named and described close on a quarter of a million of living species of plants altogether, including the lower and often nearly invisible forms, and of this vast number about one hundred and thirty thousand belong to the highest group of all—the Angiosperms. ”

“ Now, although I have cultivated the field of North American botany with some assiduity for more than fifty years, have reviewed our vegetable hosts, and assigned to no small number of them their name and their place in the ranks, yet, so far as our own wide country is concerned, I have been, to a great extent, a close botanist. ”

“ A botanist is interested directly in the affinities and evolution of these plants, and in the principles of biology which underlie their history. He pushes his researches further and further into the individual matters that come to light, without, as a rule, more than a passing reflection upon the abstract nature of the methods which he is creating as his work proceeds. ”

“ A good practical botanist must be educated among the wild scenes of nature, while a finished theoretical one requires the additional assistance of gardens and books, to which must be superadded the frequent use of a good herbarium. When plants are well dried, the original forms and positions of even their minutest parts, though not their colours, may at any time be restored by immersion in hot water. ”

“ One of the first difficulties the student will have to encounter is the unsettled state in which he will find many genera, and far more species, of plants, so common as to be met with in every hedge and wood; for, unfortunately, scarcely two botanists of the present day can agree upon what should constitute generic, much less specific, distinctions. This may appear a startling assertion, but in making it I am borne out by one of the best and most accomplished botanist of our time, whose ideas on this subject I shall take the liberty to give in his own words. ”

“ The botanist also finds his special satisfactions in our flower. It has some strange peculiarities of structure. So loose is the internal distribution of its tissues, that it was for some time held doubtful to which of the two great vegetable divisions, exogenous or endogenous, it belonged. Its petals, moreover, furnish the best example of the gradual transition of petals into stamens, —illustrating that wonderful law of identity which is the great discovery of modern science. ”

“ A trained botanist will gather an herbarium from a country lane that will give a more extended knowledge of botany than a less skilful one could get by travelling through the woods and fields of a continent. ”

“ The youngest branch of Botany is Ecology or the study of vegetation in relation to habitat—particularly soil in its widest sense. This department deals with the recognition and distribution of the different types of plant community in relation to topography and the factors—chemical, physical and biologic—which determine this distribution. Ecology has the great merit of taking its followers into the field, where they are confronted with a wide range of problems not hitherto regarded as strictly within the province of the botanist. ”

“ There are botanists among them, equally familiar with either the Linnaean or the Natural system, who know the name and habitat of every plant within a day's walk from their dwellings; who steal the holiday of a day or two when any particular plant should be in flower, and tying up their simple food in their pocket-handkerchiefs, set off with single purpose to fetch home the humble-looking weed. ”

“ Woodcuts are added to supply any defects in the description, and to give a clear idea of the plant intended by the name; and these figures, which always give the whole plant and were drawn immediately from nature by the hands of practised artists, are so true to nature that a botanist's eye at once recognises in every case the object meant to be represented. ”

“ Yet we venture to say that this work will add to his reputation with those who can understand the difficulties of his task, and can appreciate the completeness with which it is executed. Almost any one, familiar with botanical terms, can so describe a species that it may be identified by another. It is the treatment of large genera that puts the systematic botanist to the test. ”

“ There is no doubt that constant critical examination of the artist’s work must have tended to educate the eye of the botanist who supervised his124 efforts, and to increase his perception of delicate shades of difference or similarity of form, which he might never have noticed, or attempted to express in words, if the draughtsman had not, as it were, lent him his trained eyesight. ”

“ So multifarious have become the problems that have entered into the study of botany in these latter days, that it is sometimes difficult for a layman, brought up in the ancient conception of botany as the mere study of flowers, to understand the breadth of scientific training involved in the development of a modern botanist ”

“ But many men have spent their whole lives in deciphering all the fragments that could be found, and though the section given in Fig. 49 may look to you quite incomprehensible, yet a botanist can reed it as we read a book. For example, at S and L, where stems are cut across, he can learn exactly how they were build up inside, and compare them with the stems of living plants, while the fruits cc and the little round spores lying near them, tell him their history as well as if he had gathered them from the tree. ”

“ The old botanists indeed had examined with every minuteness the structure and economy of the blossoms, had counted the stamens and the pistils, and known the origin of the swelling of the seed-vessel. And what Linnæus had systematized, Erasmus Darwin endeavoured to turn into a romance. Science was to be made popular in a long didactic poem, and The Loves of the Plants was the curious result. ”

“ To him, it 7 makes the main difference between one plant and another, whether it is to tell as a light upon the ground, or as a shade upon the sky. And if, after this, we asked for a little help from the botanist, and he were to lead us, leaving the blossoms, to look more carefully at leaves and buds, we should find ourselves able in some sort to justify, even to him, our childish classification. For our present purposes, justifiable or not, it is the most suggestive and convenient. Plants are, indeed, broadly referable to two great classes. ”

“ Hooker, whom I have often cited in this chapter, Mr. Darwin has spoken in the Introduction to his 'Origin of Species,' as one 'who had, for fifteen years, aided him in every possible way, by his large stores of knowledge, and his excellent judgement.' This distinguished botanist published his 'Introductory Essay to the Flora of Australia' [7] in 1859, the year after the memoir on 'Natural Selection' was communicated to the Linnæan Society, and a few months before the appearance of the 'Origin of Species.'
Having, in the course of his extensive travels, studied the botany of arctic, temperate, and tropical regions, and written on the flora of India, which he had examined at all heights above the sea, from the plains of Bengal to the limits of perpetual snow in the Himalaya, and having specially devoted his attention to 'geographical varieties,' or those changes of character which plants exhibit, when traced over wide areas and seen under new conditions; ”

“ Nevertheless Linnæus, and all true philosophical botanists since the first mention of the natural affinities of plants, have ever considered them as the most important and interesting branch, or rather the fundamental part, of systematical botany. Without them the science is truly a study of words, contributing nothing to enlarge, little worthy to exercise, a rational mind. ”

“ How these Northern and Southwestern floras have become intermingled, the geographic limits of separate species, and the gradual changes observable in the specific characters of some of our plants in passing between distant parts of their range, are themes of sufficient interest to repay the careful observations of amateur botanists in all parts of our country. In these directions important additions to botanic science may be made by many who have neither leisure nor ability for valuable biologic study of plants, but who love the search for wild flowers. ”

“ In arranging plants according to a natural method, we require to have a thorough knowledge of structural and morphological botany, and hence we find that the advances made in these departments have materially aided the efforts of systematic botanists. ”

“ All who occupy themselves in any way with botany are divided into two great classes, the true botanists and mere botanophils, and it is very characteristic of his way of thinking that he places anatomists, gardeners, and physicians in the latter class. True botanists again are either mere collectors or systematists. To the collectors belong all who add to the number of known plants, also authors of monographs and floras, and the botanical explorers of foreign countries, whom we should now more courteously call systematists. ”

“ When we consider to what an extent the time and power of work of the most eminent botanists was devoted after 1840 to long and difficult observations on the minute anatomy of plants, on cell-formation, embryology and the history of the development of organs, we cannot wonder if other parts of vegetable physiology, which require experiments on vegetation in plants, were cultivated but little and by the way only ”

“ As the knowledge of the morphology, physiology, and reproduction of plants increased, such systems were recognised as unscientific, and it became the aim of botanists to establish a natural system, founded upon mutual relationships, which would associate together only those plants which are truly allied. ”