41 
‘THE CHEMISTRY OF SOME COMMON PLANTS. 
P. Q. KEEGAN, LL.D., 
Patterdale, Uliswater. 
Wuat is the reason why so very few members of the grand army of 
plant grubbers (collectors) ever take note of the fact that the true 
scientific study of plants consists not in naming them (which is mere 
literature), but in analysing them? Possibly the reason of this 
neglect in most cases is that persons who take an interest in botany 
in an intensely literary country like our own, strongly object to what 
Wordsworth would call ‘murdering to dissect.’ If they do not 
hesitate to press the very life out of a collected plant in order to 
preserve it for the herbarium, they at all events are exceedingly averse 
to ‘misshape the beauteous forms of things,’ in order to satisfy the 
cravings of ‘our meddling intellect.’ No doubt it is true that for 
anatomical analysis the parts of plants are killed, dissected, prepared, 
-etc., for the microscope, yet at the same time this mere ‘ dry bones’ 
dissection may convey a very inadequate conception of the life of 
the plant itself. Anatomy is a grand step towards physiology, but 
a more effective and bounding step is taken when the chemistry of 
the plant is studied, for then inasmuch as the very elements or 
principles which are the most direct and immediate products of the 
-enginery of the vital process itself are clearly detected and distinctly 
separated, we can thereby attain to a fuller, juster, and more adequate 
idea of vegetable life than by any other means whatsoever. It may 
be held, moreover, that in this way we really ‘ dissect to live,’ so to 
speak, and not ‘ murder to dissect.’ 
In directing attention in this paper to some of the chief chemical 
constituents of a few of the commoner species of plants (all obtained 
in the Lake District), it is hoped that a keener interest in a subject, 
which is at once exceedingly interesting and eminently scientific, may 
be excited in the minds of amateur botanists, and of all who are 
iat ane in shen inter We will commence with the ‘bold, joyous, 
-and lav 
rcup (Ranunculus bulbosus). ‘The brilliant golden shimmer 
‘of the corolla is due to a pigment called carotin (on account of its 
presence in carrot root), which is amassed in discoidal bodies 
especially towards the base of the petal; in other parts, especially 
_ When the flower is fully expanded, it seems diffused in oily droplets 
or amorphous granules ; but in either case, the starch which exists 
in minute grains in the subjacent tissue, acts as a sort of reflector 
contributing greatly to enhance the effect of the pigment. The 
February 18 1897. 
