CHAPTER I 



INTRODUCTION 



When we speak of the Science of Botany to the ordinary man or woman 

 the idea which usually arises in the mind is that of the study of flowers, and 

 as a natural result Botany is conceived by the uninitiated as a science dealing 

 with garden and wayside plants, and the student of Botany as a kind of 

 glorified gardener who knows the proper names of plants and how to grow 

 them. Such a conception is, of course, entirely wrong. Botany is something 

 very much wider than that, for the study of garden flowers is the province 

 of the horticulturist, who may, or may not, be a botanist. Again the know- 

 ledge of the names of wild plants is the special work of a small section of 

 botanists, and is not by any means the whole subject. 



Natural Science may be divided into the Pure Sciences and the Applied 

 Sciences, the former being concerned with the science of the world in which 

 we live, the latter with the economic and practical applications in which the 

 natural sciences can be employed. The four primary natural sciences are 

 Biology, Geology, Chemistry and Physics. Biology is the science which 

 studies life in all its aspects. Its scope is vast, for it includes not only the 

 study of animals and plants but that of man as well. For practical con- 

 venience Biology is divisible into the study of animals and the study of plants. 

 The former we designate as Zoology, the latter as Botany. 



Botany, therefore, is the study of life as found in the plant kingdom. 

 In order to appreciate the vast size of this problem, we should realize in the 

 first place that the Flowering Plants only form quite a small proportion of 

 the types of plants known to exist at the present time. Included in the 

 term plants are, of course, the Club Mosses, the Ferns, the Mosses and the 

 Seaweeds, and also a very large assemblage of organisms much less obviously 

 plants, such as the Fungi and Bacteria, and countless diflFerent kinds of 

 microscopic organisms which float about in the waters of any pool or stream. 

 Our subject, however, does not end there, for we know from a study of 

 the rocks that many kinds of ancient plants, unlike those of the present day, 

 can be discovered buried in the various geological strata, and a special branch 

 of Botany, Palaeobotany, deals exclusively with this section of plants. 



Having thus, in very general terms, indicated the range of organisms 

 which are included in the plant kingdom, let us consider the ways in which 

 they may be studied. We may in the first place consider their external form, 

 or we may investigate their internal structure. Thus at the outset we come 

 up against two of the main divisions of the subject. Morphology and 

 Anatomy, which are themselves closely related to the study of plant evolu- 

 tion or Phylogeny. There are many others : the study of the functions 



