HORTICULTURAL JOURNAL. 103 



The study of Botany does not consist, as is sometimes thought, in gather- 

 ing more or less of plants, in giving them names more or less odd, in labelling 

 and arranging them in an herbarium. Although the only occupation of a 

 goodly number of persons who call and perhaps think themselves botanists, it 

 is but a work purely material and preparatory, and which conducts to no re- 

 sult, if the mind of the observer does not know how to elevate itself to higher 

 philosophic conceptions, — if, aided by the exact knowledge of facts, he does 

 not seek to recognize the mode of action of the two fundamental laws of har- 

 mony and variety which rule all the others; the comparative study of these 

 laws, the intelligent contemplation of the mysteries of creation- — -such is the 

 real end of Botany, as of the other natural sciences. 



" If Botany," says an author* " consisted only in the minute description of 

 different parts of a plant, it would be but a cold and dry science, a barren 

 anatomy which spoke only to the eyes and occupied but the memory. The 

 principal object of natural histoid is not to know the infinitely varied form 

 with which the creator has clothed animals and plants, nor the innumerable 

 denominations which it has pleased men to give to these forms and to the be- 

 ings which present them ; true science, the only one capable of enlarging 

 ideas, is that which tends constantly to compare with each other the most 

 dissimilar beings, to seize not only their differences, but also their analogies y 

 to simplify by thought the apparent complication of their structure, to bring 

 towards a small number of primitive types the forms so multiplied and so odd; 

 which we meet in living bodies — a valuable reduction which gives the power 

 to embrace in a rapid glance the appearance of an entire kingdom. True 

 Botany is the philosophic and patient observation of the admirable precau- 

 tions accumulated by the creator to furnish to the vegetable the means of ac- 

 complishing it3 destiny from the moment that the seed, soft and weak, sur- 

 rounded by destructive causes, feebly pushes its two first leaves to the top 

 of the soil, to the time when, become a giant tree, it braves its enemies of 

 every kind and produces by thousands beings like itself." 



But to be able to observe with advantage the marvellous functions execu- 

 ted by the organs of the plant, one must know T before all things the structure 

 of these organs ; to be able to read readily in this great book of nature, it is 

 necessary to possess the alphabet, and that alphabet is Anatomy. 



The history of plants is a science so complex that it is indispensable to 

 facilitate the study of it, to divide it into different branches, according to the 

 different relations under which we must consider it. But it must not be lost 

 sight of that these distinctions, necessary to the bounded intellect of man, 

 have no reality in nature; that each one of these divisions does not form a 



*Emm Le Maout, Elementary Ltssonx in Botany. 



