THE PRINCIPLES OF BOTANY. 
677 
primary cause of the disease. The animal was driven on a 
full stomach, fermentation was set up, the body became 
tympanitic, colicy pains ensued, and during the animal's 
struggles the bowels thus became entangled. 
THE PRINCIPLES OF BOTANY. 
By Professor James Buckman, F.L.S., F.G.S., &c. 
( Continued from p>. 618 .) 
Flowering Plants. 
We have now progressed towards those more highly 
organised plants which are distinguished by the possession of 
separate parts called flowers, in which, besides those meta- 
morphosed leaves called floral envelopes , we meet with still 
more and greater departures from the leaf-type in their sexual 
organs. 
But besides this, a still more remarkable progression may 
be observed in the seeds, which instead of being simply spores 
are themselves highly organised structures, many of these 
indeed consisting of a well-formed bud, the plumule ; the 
commencement of the root, the radicle. These are enveloped 
in a more or less thickened leaf or leaves, cotyledons ; and 
the whole wrapt up in its own peculiar skin or covering, 
testa. 
These seeds again are invested, enclosed, or embedded in a 
capsular or some other covering, the whole forming a more 
or less complicated fruit. Not only then in flowering plants 
have we to deal with hosts of vegetable productions all highly 
organised, but also we shall find that their different parts 
have often distinctive, dietetic, or medicinal qualities, as thus 
the seeds of the cereal grasses are saved as “ corn," while 
the herbage is used for divers purposes. The tuber of the 
potato is esculent, whilst the stems furnish a narcotic poison 
known as solanine. In some plants the roots, in others the 
stems, others again the bark, and in many the fruits are the 
useful products ; and of these latter, in some the seeds are 
rejected, while the pulp is partaken of, whilst again in not a 
few the seeds only are of any utility. 
Truly then in flowering plants we have a most interesting 
and various assemblage of vegetable forms whose cell modifi- 
cations, however endless they may be, are all reduceable to 
simple elements. 
xliii. 45 
