140 
JOURNAL OF THE PLYMOUTH INSTITUTION. 
OUR LOCAL FLOE A : ITS ECONOMIC ASPECT. 
ABSTRACT OF LECTURE BY DOUGLAS D. DOBELL. 
(Read 4th December, .1884.) 
Although vegetable substances enter into our food, our clothing, 
and our habitations, and into the food of the animals whose flesh 
we eat, yet, owing to the great growth of commerce during the 
nineteenth century, our subject is of less intrinsic than historic 
importance. Many useful plants growing more or less plentifully 
wild would be also cultivated, could they not be imported for 
a less cost than the cost of cultivation at home. Concurrent with 
this lessened home cultivation of economic plants, in consequence 
of the extension of international trade, there has been by 
botanists during the same period a growing disinterest in the 
properties of plants. 
To describe all the economic uses to which vegetables are 
applied, and the important trades dependent on this source, is 
impossible within the limits of this paper. Many persons owe 
their surnames to their ancestors' occupation in connection with 
vegetable materials. Of these are the family names : Cooper, 
Carpenter, Dyer, Tanner, Turner, Wheeler, Weaver, Barker, 
Hayward, Gardener, Miller, Bowyer. . 
The insufficiency of the classification prevalent until 200 years 
ago of plants according to their supposed qualities in medicine, or 
for other human wants was referred to ; as also the assistance during 
the present century of chemistry to economic botany; and the 
generalization of the conservation of energy and matter, an outcome 
of Priestley's observation of the effect of a growing sprig of mint 
put into a glass of water and exposed to the rays of the sun. 
Economic botany, however subordinate scientifically to systematic 
botany, can yet, the lecturer proceeded, give some general 
truths concerning the uses of plants, the great producers. Thus 
every known cruciferous species being good for human food, or at 
