to be acquainted with the sciences which treat of these as 
objects of Natural history. 
Vegetables and their products appear so naturally con- 
nected with the healing art, that one of the gods of the 
East is represented (having assumed the character of a 
chief physician), as delivering his instructions on the 
doctrines of medicine, in a forest of medical plants, 
in the presence of gods, sages, and a large train of both 
orthodox and heretical hearers. Certainly as plants 
yielded some of the earliest, so they continue to afford 
many of the most valuable articles of the Materia Medica 
of every country of the globe ; and the science of vegetation 
therefore is one of those most closely connected with our 
subject. Whether we consider the vast variety of beautiful 
objects brought under review ; or the interesting nature of 
the information which we obtain, by examining into the 
structure, functions, and properties of each ; or the value 
of the inferences which may be deduced, as applicable to 
medicine, agriculture, or the arts ; there are few that can be 
compared with it either in variety or value. This statement 
may appear overstrained to many who have been in the habit 
of regarding Botany as a science of names only; but it can be 
so accounted by those alone who, not considering that a 
multitude of natural objects must necessarily be distin- 
guished by an equal number of names, are appalled by 
the apparently insurmountable difficulties, and never look 
from names to the things they indicate. As if a stranger, 
on entering the vestibule of one of our modern museums, 
should, from a view of the dilapidated monuments and 
illegible inscriptions of antiquity, pronounce at once upon 
their uselessness, because he himself was unable in the one 
to decipher the history of past times, or to read in the 
other the mind and design of the sculptor or architect. 
But we have not to examine the objects of Botany, nor to 
