I.] CLASSIFICATION. 125 



Orders to which most Indian plants belong. In the foUow- 

 lowing pages you will observe that in nearly every case each 

 plant is designated both by an English or native and by 

 a scientific name. This is done partly that you may be 

 familiarized with a plan of naming plants based upon defi- 

 nite principles, and partly that the memory may be stored 

 (though we would not have it burdened) with at least the 

 generic scientific names of the more important common 

 native and cultivated plants, which names are in use amongst 

 botanists of all countries. 



2. The scientific name of every plant consists of two 

 words, a substantive and an adjective. The substantive is 

 the name of the genus, as Brown or Jones may be the name 

 of a family. The adjective indicates the species, as John, 

 Thomas, or William indicates the individual member of a 

 family. 



But species is a collective term, and the same specific najne 

 is applied to all the individuals which belong to the same 

 species. All individual plants which resemble each other so 

 nearly that it is consistent with experience to suppose that 

 they may all have sprung from one parent stock, are re- 

 garded as belonging to the same species. In other words, 

 the differences between the individuals of the same species 

 are generally not greater than we are accustomed to observe 

 between the individual plants in a field of Poppies, or of 

 Rice, or in a bed of any garden annual sown with seed 

 which we know to have been gathered originally from a 

 single plant. All plants, therefore, which resemble each 

 other thus nearly are referred to the same species, and the 

 same specific adjective name is employed to designate them. 



Then again, species which resemble each other in all im- 

 portant particulars of structure (though it is impossible to 

 define the exact particulars, for to a great extent they are 



