BOTANY AS APPLIED TO VETERINARY SCIENCE. 135 
readers, many of whom have had no opportunity of ob¬ 
taining a knowledge of the science except from their own 
researches. I shall, therefore, for the sake of convenience, 
consider these plants under three heads, viz.: 
1. Plants constituting the food of our domesticated animals. 
2. Plants employed as medicinal agents. 
3. Poisonous plants. 
In doing this I shall confine myself to those in common 
use, giving the chief botanical characteristics which distin¬ 
guish them, adding any other remarks respecting their 
properties, &c., that I may deem necessary. The first- 
named I shall obtain from our best authors on the subject. 
But before doing so I have thought it might not be out of 
place, and would make the subject more interesting, were I 
to give a slight outline of the systems by which botanists 
have arranged plants; and having done this, to describe the 
names given to the different parts of a flower. In this latter 
I shall be much assisted by a few sketches which the Editors 
have kindly had engraved for me. 
There are at the present time known to botanists upwards 
of 80,000 flowering plants, besides great numbers which pro¬ 
duce no true flowers; it, therefore, becomes obvious, that 
some definite arrangement must be adopted under which 
these different varieties might be grouped together for in¬ 
vestigation. Efforts to attain this end were made by different 
botanists, from the time of Theophrastus and Dioscorides 
down to about the middle of the last century ; some adopt¬ 
ing the method of classification from the fruit, others from 
the shape of the corolla, &c., but all were very imperfect, 
and indeed nothing approaching to a perfect arrangement was 
arrived at until the great Linnaeus brought forward his very 
comprehensive and beautiful system, called, after his name, 
the Linnean System. 
This system continued to be used by botanists for many 
years, but at the present day the Natural System,” as first 
suggested by Jussieu, and improved by succeeding botanists, 
is the one more frequently followed. I shall, therefore, con¬ 
fine myself to a brief description of these two systems— 
the Linnean or artificial system, and the natural system, as 
accepted by Dr. Lindley. 
The Artificial System. 
The object of this system is the arrangement of different 
plants according to their reproductive organs, without any 
