262 ON THE IMPORTANCE OF THE STUDY OF 



for a doctor, to one who had heard, in a very learned assembly too, 

 a yellow gentian, in full flower, hailed as a splendid specimen of digi- 

 talis. Such ignorance, however, was pardonable in the accomplished 

 individual who betrayed it — in one educated at a period in which 

 the utility of botany was not even dreamed of, as a necessary part 

 of the study for a physician. Now, however, who would be justi- 

 fied in pleading apology for overlooking or slighting the advantages 

 it offers ? Surely no one is ignorant that the structure of the 

 vegetable frame is determined by laws as absolute, as invariable in 

 their action, when left to the guidance of nature, as are those which 

 govern the development of the various species of animal existence ; 

 and that as the mighty genius of comparative anatomy, the highly 

 talented and lamented Cuvier, could, by his magic touch, bid the 

 disunited and scattered bones of a thousand different individuals ar- 

 range in the original order of the frames they once gave form to 

 and supported ; so the botanist, practised in the intricate lore of 

 vegetable anatomy and physiology, reads often, in the venation of a 

 leaf, or the texture of a bark, the character of the plant to which it 

 belonged, in opposition to that of others whose products may be 

 mingled with them. Thus, without any knowledge of the individu- 

 al plant which produced them, he would scarcely suspect the dotted 

 leaves of this plant, to possess the same qualities with the finely re- 

 ticulated ones of that beside it — because the very presence of such 

 dots upon leaves, which are glands for the secretion of some essen- 

 tial oil, he knows to be, in almost every instance, an important and 

 invariable feature of the order or natural group in which it is found 

 and, therefore, that their absence betokens very different affinities 

 and properties. In the same way, he would not mistake the silky- 

 textured bark of the thymeleae, the daphne or mezereum tribe, for 

 that of the laurinese, the bay or cinnamon tribe ; the different struc- 

 ture of the two would be to him as certainly indicative of their 

 being the produce of two widely distant orders, as is the caustic 

 character of the former, contrasted with the fine aromatic and sto- 

 machic qualities of the latter. 



It is true such important distinctions as these may not exist be- 

 tween the much libelled Peruvian drug, and its spurious substitutes 

 or representatives, but another branch of botanical knowledge would 



