STRUCTURAL BOTANY 



THE BASIS OF MORPHOLOGY. 



INTRODUCTION. 



1. THE two Biological Sciences, 1 considered as parts of Natural 

 History, are Zoology and Botany. The latter is the natural 

 history of the Vegetable Kingdom. It embraces every scientific 

 inquiry that can be made respecting plants, their nature, their 

 kinds, the laws which govern them, and the part they play in 

 the general economy of the world. 



2. We cannot distinguish the vegetable from the animal king- 

 dom by an}' complete and precise definition. Although ordinary 

 observation of their usual representatives maj- discern little that 

 is common to the two, yet there are many simple forms of life 

 which hardly rise high enough in the scale of being to rank dis- 

 tinctively either as plant or animal ; there are undoubted plants 

 possessing faculties which are generally deemed characteristic of 

 animals ; and some plants of the highest grade share in these 

 endowments. But in general there is a marked contrast between 

 animal and vegetable life, and in the part which animals and 

 plants respectively play in nature. 



3. Plants only are nourished upon mineral matter, upon earth 

 and air. It is their peculiar office to appropriate mineral mate- 

 rials and to organize them into a structure in which life is mani- 

 fested, into a structure which is therefore called organic. So 

 the material fitted for such structure, and of which the bodies 



1 Biology, the science of life, or rather of living things, in its earlier use 

 was equivalent to physiology : recently, it has come to denote the natural 

 history of plants and animals, t. e. of the two organic kingdoms, including 

 both their physiology and descriptive natural history. 

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