38 PLANTS: THEIR NA TURAL GROWTH 



lovely contrasts and harmonies are found — crimson, deep yellow, pale green, clear brown, varying" 

 shades of purple and grey. Seaweeds too, as materials for design, have never received a tithe of 

 the attention they deserve— 



" The deep's untrampled floor, 

 With green and purple seaweeds strewn," 



seems a veritable terra incognita to our designers, yet every beach is strewn with forms of 

 surpassing beauty, in form and colour alike excellent. About 380 species are found on the 

 British coasts. Fungi, or toadstools, though repellent to many persons, are often very beautiful 

 in colour, sometimes, as in the scarlet fly Agaric (Agaricus muscarius), of an intense red, or, as in 

 the Clavaria fusiformis, a deep orange yellow; lilac in the Agaricus personatus ; brown in the 

 Boletus edulis ; white as snow in Clavaria rugosa; lemon yellow in C Amethystina ; or black, as 

 in the Tuber Cibarium. 



As it has been necessary, in speaking of the various Crane's-bills, to repeatedly use the 

 generic term Geranium, adding to it some distinctive term, as Robertianum, molle, or pratense, 

 to indicate the particular plant in question, the present seems a convenient opportunity of giving 

 some explanation, in passing, as regards these purely scientific names. Botanical study subdivides 

 itself into several very distinct sections : thus we get the physiology of plants, a study that concerns 

 itself with the vital functions and organisms ; economic botany, or a study of plants in their application 

 to the service of man, medicinally, commercially, &c. ; and the study, again, of plants with a view to 

 their identification and classification. This is known as systematic botany. As upwards of 100,000 

 plants are now known, the necessity of some means of classifying them will be at once apparent, 

 since, while each plant must have a distinctive title belonging to itself alone, it is evident that no 

 memory, however cultivated, could retain 100,000 distinct names bearing no sort of association 

 with each other ; hence a second name that is common to several plants on account of some 

 peculiarity they possess in common. Thus, for example, there are many plants which, from their 

 similarity, we call roses : rose, then, is a name we give to a genus or collection of similar plants, 

 while, to mark the slighter differences, we call one a red rose, another a white rose, a third a sweet- 

 scented rose. The substantive is the generic name, and indicates those points in which a certain 

 number of plants agree ; the adjective is the specific name, and points out some characteristic in 

 which that particular plant differs from all others allied with it. In ordinary conversation we put 

 the specific before the generic name — as, for instance, white rose, while botanically the generic 

 name precedes the other, as Lathyrus hirsutus, Lathyrus sylvestris, Lathyrus tuberosus, Lathyrus 

 maritiftius, one Lathyrus being hairy, another a dweller in woods, the third tuberous, the last a 

 sea-side plant The genera of plants being still too numerous for study without some further 

 scheme of classification (as there are over 6,000 genera), those which, in some degree, resemble 

 each other are aggregated into groups, called farqilies or orders, while these natural orders (some 300 

 in number) are again collected into classes. The number of plants comprised in any one of these 

 divisions is very variable — thus, in some cases, one or two species, though somewhat similar in 

 themselves, may differ so entirely from others as to constitute the entire genus, while in others a 

 hundred or more plants may all be included under one generic head. 



PLATE 23. 



" Happy is he who lives to understand, 

 Not hunian nature only, but explores 

 All natures — to the end that he may find 

 The law that governs each j, and where begins 

 The union, the partition where, that makes 

 Kind and degree among all visible beings ; 

 The constitutions, powers, and faculties 

 Which they inherit — cannot step beyond^-- 

 And cannot fall beneath ; that do assign 

 To every class its station and its office. 

 Through all the mighty commonwealth of things ; 

 Up from the creeping plant to sovereign man."— Wordsworth. 



The Leopard's-bane (Doronicum Pardalianckes), though not truly a native of Britain, has 

 been largely cultivated in cottage gardens, and has readily spread from thence, so that in many 

 parts of the country the plant has become so completely naturalised as to thoroughly justify its 

 insertion in our Flora. It is found in flower during the Spring and the earlier months of the 

 Summer. There is a considerable variation of form in the leaves, the upper, as seen in the plate, 

 being sessile and clasping the stem, the intermediate ones, on a short petiole with two broad 

 lobes half surrounding the stem, while the lowermost are on long and naked petioles as shown in 



