INTRODUCTION 



a few plants is a poor insipid study, scarcely worth the following ; but to 

 know the hidden structure of such curious objects, to be acquainted with the 

 singular manner in which the various actions of their lives are performed, 

 and to learn by what certain signs their relationship for they have their 

 relations like ourselves is indicated, is surely among the most rational and 

 pleasing of pursuits." Depend upon it, therefore, if the study of Botany has 

 become to any one a dead letter instead of a living word, it is because it has 

 been pursued apart from Nature, and hence the great purpose of the science 



has never been truly 

 grasped. 



The truth is there are 

 botanists and botanists. 

 There are some who have 

 an intimate acquaintance 

 with all the plants of their 

 neighbourhood know them 

 at sight, and can name them 

 correctly when they are in 

 flower. They know them 

 indeed as flowers, but be- 

 3 r ond the identification can 

 tell you little about them. 

 They delight in the beauty 

 and fragrance of the blos- 

 soms, and probably regard 

 them in the good old- 

 fashioned orthodox way, as 

 created merely to gratify 

 the eye and the aesthetic 

 sense of man. There are 

 others, with the collecting 

 mania strong upon them, 

 whose chief interest in the 

 plants of a new locality is to 

 discover how many blanks 

 in their herbarium they can 

 fill up. This kind of 

 botanist may know all about 

 names and localities and 

 the comparative rarity of his spoils, but probably little about the living 

 plant. Another type is the botanist of the schools, who knows all the 

 most advanced theories of plant physiology and tissues, but will probably 

 fail in the field to identify correctly the commonest weeds. And then there 

 are the specialists and splitters, the men who have an exhaustive knowledge 



Photo by] [E. J. Wallis. 



FIG. 5. HUNTSMAN'S HORN PITCHER-PLANT 



(Sarracenia flava). 



The long pitchers contain a liquid in which insects are drowned, their bodies 

 serving for the sustenance of the Plant. NORTH AMERICA. 



