Botany

“ From the very beginning of its existence, the study of plants has been approached from two widely separated standpoints—the philosophical and the utilitarian. Regarded from the first point of view, Botany stands on its own merits, as an integral branch of natural philosophy, whereas, from the second, it is merely a by-product of medicine or agriculture. ”

“ It must be remembered that botany does not consist in collecting, drying, and drawing plants alone, but it relates to everything about the vegetable kingdom of nature. The growth of the plant from the seed; how it lives, breathes, and its sap circulates ”

“ What is Botany? The pupils are very apt to say at first that it is learning about flowers. The teacher can draw their attention to the fact that flowers are only a part of the plant, and that Botany is also the study of the leaves, the stem, and the root. Botany is the science of plants. ”

“ 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. ”

“ According to the Vestiges of Creation, terrestrial botany began with classes of comparatively simple forms and structure. In the ranks of the vegetable kingdom the lowest place is taken by plants of cellular tissue, and which have no flowers, as lichens, mosses, fungi, ferns, and sea-weeds. ”

“ The first of these departments of knowledge comprehends, along with the consideration of simple minerals, that of the masses produced by the aggregation of these substances, and the changes effected upon them by natural causes. Botany teaches us to distinguish and arrange the subjects of the vegetable kingdom, points out the forms and functions of their organs, investigates their internal structure, traces them in their distribution over the surface of the globe, and makes known the various properties which render them noxious or useful to us. ”

“ The progress of a science, like that of a sailing boat, more often proceeds by means of “tacking” than by following a direct course.
In the case of botany, the path which was destined to lead furthest in the end was the apparently unpromising one of medicine. Various plants from very early times had been used as healing agents, and it became necessary to study them in detail, simply in order to discriminate the kinds employed for different purposes. It was from this7 purely utilitarian beginning that systematic botany for the most part originated. ”

“ In his works, he rises above mere technical description of the species with which he is dealing. His mind is filled with the beauty and wonder of plants; and he strives to impress the reader with the deep interest of the study of botany. ”

“ There can be only one natural system of botany, if by this term is meant the plan according to which the vegetable creation was called into being, with all its grades and diversities among the species, as well of past as of the present time. ”

“ He began at an early age to evince a love of botany and to give proof of the strong critical faculty which enabled him so successfully to solve the problems he attacked, and so materially to advance our science. ”

“ There is nothing in the elementary study of botany which cannot be introduced in a vital way in connection with caring for the growth of seeds. Instead of the subject matter belonging to a peculiar study called botany, it will then belong to life, and will find, moreover, its natural correlations with the facts of soil, animal life, and human relations. ”

“ After the many elementary works on Botany which have appeared in various languages, any new attempt of the same kind may, at first sight, seem unnecessary. But when we consider the rapid progress of the science within a few years, in the acquisition and determination of new plants, and especially the discoveries and improvements in vegetable physiology ”

“ Botany is the name of the science of the vegetable kingdom in general; that is, of plants. ”

“ A great and just complaint has arisen in my time among the cultivators of botany, who found the names of many garden plants, with which they had long been conversant, altered for others without any apparent cause, and in many instances for the worse ”

“ Besides, we well know that they had never described the character of plants, such as the figure of their corollas, calyx, or pericarp, but only ascertained and handed down to their posterity the suitable medicinal properties of vegetables; and, however much more useful this sort of knowledge might be, yet it certainly was only a branch of medicine, and can by no means be comprehended within the term Botany, which, strictly speaking, is that Science which treats of the structure, organization, and characters of plants ”

“ In botany, where the factors both chemically and mechanically are extremely various, we find simple laws obeyed in the disposition of leaves, flowers, and parts of flowers; a remarkable instance of which occurs in the growth of leaves on spirally-leaved plants. ”

“ We wish here to enter a strong protest against the only too prevalent idea that the chief aim of botany is the ability to run down a plant by means of an “Analytical Key,” the subject being exhausted as soon as the name of the plant is discovered. A knowledge of the plant itself is far more important than its name, however desirable it may be to know the latter. ”

“ In botany we have no such word as fruit. What you call fruit is in some trees the seed. In all species of nuts, for instance, the fruit and the seed are one and the same thing—that is to say, the kernel of the nut is both fruit and seed. ”

“ This description, short as it is, contains every thing that the ancients have said in order to characterize that plant. It can, indeed, be understood only by those who are acquainted with the terms of botany ”

“ In order to meet the requirements of beginners, all botanical terms have been omitted. Those desiring precise scientific information on these plants, will of course consult works specially dealing with botany. ”

“ In boyhood he gained a knowledge of plants from his grandfather, who was an apothecary, and later he qualified as a doctor in medicine. Pursuing the study of botany in various parts of France and other countries, he began to take notice of the relation between the distribution of plants and the soils and subsoils. ”

“ Excessive devotion to the describing of plants stood in the way of such a profound study of the principles of systematic botany as might have led to enduring results, and even destroyed the very capacity for those difficult intellectual operations, which were absolutely necessary to build up a truly natural system on scientific foundations ”

“ It contains a complete, although concise, sketch of Structural Botany and Vegetable Physiology, and a birds'-eye view of the whole vegetable kingdom in its subdivision into families, illustrated by over thirteen hundred engravings on wood. It has become a standard of botany, wherever our language is read. ”

“ Botany was in a very crude condition, scarcely extending beyond such knowledge as was required on the one hand for farming and horticulture, and on the other for the vegetable medicines used by contemporary physicians. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The Grasses, Umbelliferous plants, Mosses, Sea-weeds, Ferns, Liliaceous plants, Orchises, Compound flowers, each constitute a family strikingly similar in form and qualities among themselves, and no less evidently distinct from all others. If the whole vegetable kingdom could with equal facility be distributed into tribes or classes, the study of Botany on such a plan would be no less easy than satisfactory. ”

“ The study of botany attempts to answer some of the questions raised above and many others. Subsequent parts of the book will deal with what plants are, the behavior of them, with the life histories of some of the better known ones, with the grouping of plants in families and their relationships one to another, with their uses to man, with the history of their development from the earliest times, and finally with their distribution over the earth. ”

“ The formation of an exact and extensive descriptive language for botany has been executed with a degree of skill and felicity, which, before it was attained, could hardly have been dreamt of as attainable. Every part of a plant has been named ”

“ The historians of botany have overlooked the real state of the case as here presented, or have not described it with sufficient emphasis; due attention has not been paid to the fact, that systematic botany, as it began to develope in the 17th century, contained within itself from the first two opposing elements ”

“ The chapters on the families of plants attempt to bring out the reasons for the separations of the few great groups only; detailed classification of the flowering plants has so long been considered the chief part of botany, that it is to be found in nearly every schoolbook on the subject. ”

“ But when we attempt to consider how the particular secretions of different species and tribes of plants are formed; how the same soil, the same atmosphere, should in a leaf of the vine or sorrel produce a wholesome acid, and in that of a spurge or manchineel a most virulent poison; how sweet and nutritious herbage should grow among the acrid crowfoot and aconite, we find ourselves totally unable to comprehend the existence of such wonderful powers in so small and seemingly simple an organ as the leaf of a plant. ”

“ Having examined the general structure and external form of plants, we now come to more important and even essential, though more transitory organs—the flower and fruit, or parts of fructification. By these each species is perpetually renewed without limits, so far at least as the observation of mankind has reached ”

“ Actually what are ordinarily thought of as plants make up only a fraction of the great plant world. The fact that our familiar roadside and garden plants produce blossoms followed by a fruit and seed, such as peas and beans and all the ordinary flora of any region, separates them at once from that other large group of plants that do not. Common examples of the latter class are the green scum on the ponds, moss, seaweed, the rust on wheat, yeast, disease-causing bacteria, the smallest of all known plants, and many others. ”

“ 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 ”

“ The very simplest plants (if such may specifically be called plants rather than animals, or one may say, the simplest living things) are mere particles, or pellets, or threads, or even indefinite masses of protoplasm of vague form, which possess powers of motion or of changing their shape, of imbibing water, air, and even other matters, and of assimilating these into plant-stuff for their own growth and multiplication. Their growth is increase in substance by incorporation of that which they take in and assimilate. ”

“ Among the phenomena of vegetation in woody plants, there is scarcely one so striking as the outflow of watery sap from wounded vines and from some tree-stems in the spring. This phenomenon, like the outflow of milky juice, gum, resin and the like, could not fail to be regarded with lively interest by those who occupied themselves with vegetable physiology in the 17th century. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Form, color, the secretion of sweetish nectar, the night or day blooming of different kinds of flowers, every device that will make fertilization certain, by the flower itself, by insects, or even by the wind, is used in such prodigal fashion, that we come to see the importance of it to all plants only by a realization of the complexity of it and the provisions against its failure. ”

“ This fact is of fundamental importance to the whole theory of the nutrition of plants; it is only by a knowledge of it that we can explain the movement of material connected with nutrition and growth, the dependence of vegetation on light, and to a great extent also the function of the roots. ”

“ The most prominent of these parts are root, stem, leaf, flower, fruit, and seed. Familiar plants differ wonderfully in size and shape,—from fragile mushrooms, delicate waterweeds and pond-scums, to floating leaves, soft grasses, coarse weeds, tall bushes, slender climbers, gigantic trees, and hanging moss.
The Stem Part.—In most plants there is a main central part or shaft on which the other or secondary parts are borne. This main part is the plant axis. Above ground, in most plants, the main plant axis bears the branches, leaves, and flowers; below ground, it bears the roots. ”

“ When we reflect that the constant removal of water in the leaf, both as such, and as the only carrier of food supplies from the roots, depends in such large measure upon the functioning of these guard cells, then we come to some realization of their importance to the plant. ”