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aloft over the hot vapours of the Brazilian forests, to the delicate 

 moss, barely an inch in length, which clothes our damp grottoes with 

 its phosphorescent verdure ; from the splendid flower of Victoria re- 

 gina, with its rosy leaves cradled in the silent floods of the lakes of 

 Guiana, to the inconspicuous yellow blossom of the duck-weed on 

 our own ponds ; — what a wonderful play of fashioning, what wealth 

 of forms ! 



" From the six-thousand-years-old Baobab, on the shores of 

 Senegal, the seeds of which perhaps vegetated before the foot of man 

 trod the earth, to the fungus, to which the fertilizing warmth of a 

 summer night gave an existence which the morning closed — what 

 differences of duration ! From the firm wood of the New Holland 

 oak, from which the wild aboriginal carves his war-club, to the green 

 slime upon our tombs, what multiformity, what gradations of texture, 

 composition and consistence ! Can one really believe it possible to 

 find order in this embarrassing wealth, regularity in this seemingly 

 disorderly dance of forms, a single type in these thousandfold varie- 

 ties of habit ? Till within a few years of the present time, indeed, 

 the possibility was not yet conceived, for as I have before remarked, 

 we may never expect to be enabled to spy into the mysteries of 

 Nature until we are guided by our researches to very simple relations. 

 Thus could we never attain to scientific results respecting the plant 

 till we had found the simple element, the regular basis of all the va- 

 rious forms, and investigated and defined its vital peculiarities. By 

 the help of the improved microscopes we have at last advanced far 

 enough to find the point of departure of the general theory of the 

 plant. 



" The basis of the structure of all the so very dissimilar vegetables 

 is a little closed vesicle, composed of a membrane usually transparent 

 and colourless as water ; this botanists call the ' cell,' or ' vegetable 

 cell.' A review of the life of the cell must necessarily precede the 

 endeavour to comprehend the whole plant, nay, it is as yet, properly 

 speaking, almost the only really scientific part of Botany." — p. 42. 



The author then, with the aid of coloured figures, enters upon a 

 more minute history of the cell, as the foundation of all the tissues 

 which go to make up the infinitely varied forms of plants; describ- 

 ing its appearance, contents, and mode of reproduction — each cell 

 having the property of forming within itself a number of other cells, 

 each of which is also endowed with the same property — and showing 

 in what manner the vascular and woody tissues all proceed from the 

 simple cells which are the primitive form of vegetable structure. 



