PREFACE 



Any discussion, or any indication even, of landmarks in the 

 history of botany must needs be preceded by a somewhat careful 

 enquiry into the nature and purposes of the science as such. Where- 

 in does botany, as a science, essentially consist? With this question 

 unanswered it were impracticable either to indicate the origin or 

 trace the progress of it. 



In the most extended use of the term, all information about the 

 plant world or any part of it is botany. According to this view, 

 all treatises upon agriculture, horticulture, floriculture, forestry, 

 and pharmacy, in so far as they deal with plants and their products, 

 are botanical. 



What many will consider a better use of the term is more re- 

 stricted. In this use of it there will be excluded from the category 

 of the properly botanical whatever has no bearing on the philosophy 

 of plant life and form. For example, that wheat, rice, and maize 

 agree together as to that anatomical structure which is called 

 endogenous would be a fact of purely botanical interest. Quite 

 as clearly such would be the proposition that all three belong to the 

 natural family of the grasses; or this, that each represents a genus; 

 or that the roots in all these plants are fibrous, and of only annual 

 duration. But if it be said that wheat, rice, and maize as food 

 products are of supreme importance to mankind, the affirmation 

 is as completely unbotanical as the several foregoing are per- 

 fectly botanical. It is strictly an economical consideration. 



If such a distinction between botany and plant industry as I 

 have sought thus to illustrate be received as legitimate, the province 

 of botany is easily circumscribed and its scope clearly definable. 

 In any event, for the purposes of the present work our definition 

 of this science shall be that it occupies itself with the contemplation 

 of plant as related to plant, and with the whole vegetable kingdom 

 as viewed philosophically — not economically or commercially — 

 in its relation to the mineral on the one hand, and to the animal 

 on the other. 



Such a distinguishing between the philosophical study of plants 



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