INTRODUCTORY REMARKS. 



IT has too often been supposed that the principal object of Botany is to give 

 names to the vegetable productions of the globe, and to arrange them in such a 

 way that these names may be easily found out. This is a most erroneous view 

 of the science, and one which was perhaps fostered by some of the advocates of 

 the Linnjean system. The number of species collected by a botanist is not con- 

 sidered now-a-days as a measure of his acquirements, and names and classifica- 

 tions are only the mechanism by means of which the true principles of the science 

 are elicited. The views in regard to a natural system proposed by Ray and 

 Jussieu did much to emancipate botany from the trammels of artificial methods, 

 and to place it in its proper rank as a science. Their labours have been ably 

 carried out by De Candolle, Brown, Endlicher, Lindley, Hooker, Arnott, and 

 many others. The relative importance of the different organs of plants, their 

 structure, development, and metamorphoses, are now studied upon philosophical 

 principles. The researches of Gaudichaud, Mirbel, and others, as to the struc- 

 ture and formation of wood; the observations of Schleiden and Mohl on cell 

 development; the investigations of Brown, Schleiden, Fritzsche, Amici, Meyen, 

 Griffith, and others, into the functions of the pollen, the development of the ovule, 

 and the formation of the embryo; the experiments of Schultz, Decaisne, and 

 Thuret, on the movements observed in the cells, vessels, and spores of plants, 

 and various other physiological inquiries, have promoted much our knowledge 

 of the alliances and affinities of plants. Thus the labours of vegetable anatomists 

 and physiologists all tend to give correct views of the relation which plants bear 

 to each other, and of the great plan on which they were formed by the All-wise 

 Creator. 



The Botanist, in accomplishing the ends he has in view, takes an enlarged 

 and comprehensive view of the vegetation with which the earth is clothed. He 

 considers the varied aspects under which plants appear in the different quarters 

 of the globe, from the Lichen on the Alpine summits, or on the Coral reef, to 



