INTRODUCTION. 
I. BRIEF OU’mNES OF BOTANY. 
1. Plants in General* 
1. The vegetable kingdom consists of those beings (plants) which 
derive their sustenance from the air and earth, and create the food upon 
which animals live. 
2. Plants of the higher grades bear proper flowers, which serve for the 
production of a seed, containing an embryo plantlet ready-formed; — where¬ 
fore they are called Flowering or Fh-enogamous Plants. The lower 
orders of plants exhibit a gradually simplified structure, both in their 
vegetation and fructification, and do not bear proper flowers (127) nor 
seeds in which there is any marked distinction of parts, or any embryo 
plantlet manifest antecedent to germination. They are, therefore, termed 
Flowerless or Cryptogamous Plants (the latter term denoting that 
their fructification is concealed or obscure). 
3. Taking Phsenogamous Plants as displaying the proper type and plan 
of vegetation, the following statements relate to them alone; the peculiar¬ 
ities of Cryptogamous Plants being separately explained, so far as needful, 
at the close. 
4. Plants are anatomically composed, primarily, of Cells $ which are 
closed vesicles or little bladders of organic membrane. Aggregated to¬ 
gether, and cohering more or less intimately by their contiguous surfaces, 
these form the honeycomb-like texture that vegetable matter displays 
under the microscope, and which constitutes Cellular Tissue. 
5. Of this all plants, at their earliest (embryo) state, are entirely com¬ 
posed. Indeed, the plant may be traced back by observation nearly or 
quite to a single cell 5 which cell, endowedwith the power of propagation 
equally with the fully-developed plant, gives rise to other cells possessed 
of the same powers, and so formp the whole mass of the vegetable. 
6 . The delicate walls of the cells, although not perforated with visible 
pores (except sometimes as a secondary result), are, like all organic mem¬ 
brane, permeable to fluids. Through them the food of the plant is im¬ 
bibed,— whether directly from the atmosphere in the form of air or vapor, 
or in a liquid form by the roots, — and transmitted throughout the vegeta¬ 
ble : hence, plants receive their food in a fluid state only. The cells also 
contain the juices and the products of the plant, whether liquid or solid. 
7. Besides the cellular tissue, all Phaenogamous Plants contain more or 
less of two other kinds of tissue, viz. the woody and the vascular (vessels). 
These begin to be introduced when the plant develops from the seed (or 
sometimes before germination), and serve to give greater strength and 
toughness, and to facilitate the transmission of fluid. Both of them arise, 
however, in all their forms, from the transformation of cells, of which they 
are only modifications. 
