THE 



BOTANICAL TEXT-BOOK. 



INTRODUCTION. 



GENERAL VIEW OF THE SCIENCE. 



1. Botany is the Natural History of the Vegetable Kingdom. 

 The vegetable kingdom consists of those beings (called Plants) 

 which derive their sustenance from the mineral kingdom, that is, 

 from the earth and air, and create the food upon which animals 

 live. The proof of this proposition will be hereafter afforded, in 

 the chapter upon the Food and Nutrition of Plants. The vegetable 

 kingdom, therefore, occupies a position between the mineral and 

 the animal kingdoms. Comprehensively considered, Botany accord- 

 ingly embraces every scientific inquiry that can be made respect- 

 ing plants, — their nature, their kinds, the laws which govern 

 them, and the pai't they play in the general economy of the world, 

 — their relations both to the lifeless mineral kingdom below them, 



, from wliich they draw their sustenance, and to the animal kingdom 

 above them, endowed with liigher vitahty, to which in turn they 

 render what they have thus derived. 



2. There are three aspects under which the vegetable world may 

 be contemplated, and fi-om which the various departments of the 

 science naturally arise. Plants may be considered either as indi- 

 vidual beings ; or in their relations to each other, as collectively 

 constituting a systematic unity, that is, a vegetable kingdom ; or in 

 their relations to other parts of the creation, — to the earth, to 

 animals, to man. 



3. Under the first aspect, namely, when our attention is directed 

 to the plant as an individual, Ave study its nature and structure, the 



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