FUNDAMENTAL NOTIONS 3 



3. Relation of Botany to Other Sciences. — It is not 



possible to study any one science in disregard of all the 

 others. Plants are related not only to man, but to the 

 air and soil, in which they live; their life processes 

 are chemical or physical in nature; they are distributed 

 in space over the earth's surface, and in time, in the 

 layers of rocks of various geological ages; and so the 

 study of botany touches meteorology, chemistry, physics, 

 geography, climatology, geology, the science of soils, and 

 other branches of science. 



4. Biology. — The science which deals with life in 

 general is biology, and all the sciences which deal with 

 living things are biological sciences. Zoology, human 

 anatomy and physiology, bacteriology, and botany are 

 some (but not all) of the biological sciences, and they are 

 all more or less closely related to each other. There is 

 no hard and fast boundary line between any of the 

 sciences; they represent, rather, different points of 

 view of nature. But it is convenient to subdivide our 

 knowledge more or less arbitrarily for purposes of study. 



5. Systematic Botany. — Just as the various "sciences" 

 or "knowledges" represent different points of view of 

 nature, so each science may have subdivisions, repre- 

 senting different points of view of its phenomena. The 

 study of plants for the primary purpose of ascertaining 

 their genetic relationships is systematic botany. The 

 ultimate aim of this study is to disclose the course of 

 the evolution of the plant kingdom; this aim can never 

 be fully realized, because most of the necessary data 

 have been lost forever in the course of the geological 

 evolution of the earth. Systematic botany includes: 



(a) Classification, or the arrangement of the various 



