The Elements of Botany

Description

ELEMENTS OF BOTANY



THE NATURAL HISTORY OF PLANTS



LESSON I. BOTANY. Definition of Plants Structure of Plants Nomenclature of Organs.

1. Botany (formed from the Greek word botane, a plant) is that division of Natural History which treats of vegetables.

2. The science of Botany is divided into three branches : namely, the Anatomy of Plants, Vegetable Physiology, and Descriptive Botany, which last comprises the classification of plants and their especial history.

3. Botany, therefore, does not consist, as is commonly imagined by the ignorant, in merely

“getting by heart” a great number of names of plants, and of being able to apply their names to the objects to which they belong ; but in a knowledge of the plants themselves, of their organization, their growth, their manner of living, their properties, and the relations they bear to each other, as well as the characters by which they are distin- guished from each other.

4. Dejinition of Plants. Plants are beings organized for living ; but they are not endowed, like animals, with the faculties of sensation and of performing voluntary motion.

5. Like animals, these beings are readily distinguished from inorganic bodies by their mode of structure, by their nutritive function, through the means of which their substance is renewed and augmented, by their origin, and by the limited duration of their existence.

6. They differ from animals not only in being destitute of the functions of relation, but also in many other respects. Almost all vegetables live fixed in the soil ; they absorb, from without, nutritive matters which they assimilate, without previously digesting them, and they have nothing which resembles a stomach ; by the act of respiration, they possess themselves of the carbonic acid of the air, and exhale the oxygen.


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