HISTORY OF SCIENCE. 



you would find their mere names of no use to you if you 

 wished to choose one of them to do any work, or to be 

 your friend and companion. For this you would want to 

 learn their character, their habits, and other real facts about 

 them. 



Now this last is just the kind of knowledge which is 

 required in science. If, besides the name of a plant, you 

 know its different parts, the shape of its leaves, the number 

 of its seeds, and how they are arranged in the seed-vessel, 

 the number of stamens or thread-like bodies in the middle 

 of the flower, the number and colour of its petals or flower- 

 leaves, and many other points like these, then you know 

 something of structural botany. If you know, besides, how 

 a plant takes up food, how it breathes, and how the sun- 

 light acts upon the leaves and alters the juices of the plant, 

 then y^ou know something of the life of the plant, or 

 physiological botany. If you know where the plant grows 

 best, in what soil, in what climate, and in what countries, 

 then you know something of geographical botany ; and if 

 your knowledge is accurate and carefully learnt it is real 

 science. 



By this you will see that science means not merely 

 knowledge, but an accurate and clear knowledge about the 

 things which we see around us in the universe. In the 

 present day, people are beginning to teach children much 

 more on these subjects than they did forty years ago, and 

 every intelligent boy or girl probably knows that Astronomy 

 is the science of the sun, stars, and planets ; Physics and 

 Mechanics, the sciences which teach the properties of bodies 

 and their laws of motion ; Biology the science of life ; 

 Geology the science of the earth, teaching us how the dif- 

 ferent rocks have been formed ; and Chemistry the science 

 which treats of the materials of which all substances are 



