INTRODUCTION TO BOTANY. 23 
them. In like manner medical students may proceed with 
respect to the plants of the materia medica. 
Succulent fruits and seeds can only be preserved in spirit 
of wine, or saturated brine, changing it when it becomes 
‘too highly coloured: the dry fruits and seeds require no 
other care thanto prevent the ravages of insects. 
Mushrooms may be dried by being buried in ‘very dry | 
sand, and placed in a warm situation: but some of these 
are so watery, that they cannot be preserved even in this 
or any other known method. 
To prevent the destruction cf this collection by the in- 
sects, which soon begin to attack some tribes of plants, 
especially the acrid’ and pungent families of the crucifere 
and euphorbiacez, as also the composite and umbelliferze, 
the best method seems to be the washing over of the spe- 
cimens with a hair pencil charged with a solution of cor- 
rosive sublimate in spirit of wine, after which no insect 
can touch them: but as foreigners always examine plants| 
by their taste, as well as their other characters, it wili be’ 
necessary to notice this impregnation, either at the com- 
mencement of the series, or by annexing some mark‘to 
each plant thus treated. 
5. On the Names of Plants. 
The old botanists, studying things rather than words, 
and more engaged in finding the uses of the plants that 
grew the most abundantly around them, or were imported 
by the merchants, than in forming catalogues to compre- 
hend all that nature or the province produced, contented 
themselves with the names given to the best known plants 
by the peasantry of the country, and which, when we can 
discover their true etymology, are ‘usually strikingly signi- 
ficative of them, or refer to their use in medicine, economy, 
or the arts; and as to the less known ones, they referred 
them from their appearance to some of the better known 
plants; and if they had occasion to mention them, they 
added to the name of the better known plants such short 
phrases as they judged necessary to explain the difference. - 
By this means each of the well known plants, the rose, rue, 
pea, &c. and sometimes the cultivated varieties of them, as 
chasselas, muscats, became, to use our modern language, 
the type of a genus, the species of which were distinguished 
by descviptive phrases, of greater or less length, as the dif- 
ferences were more or less distinctly marked, as the white 
