The Botanical Text-book: For Colleges, Schools, and Private Students

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Wiley & Putnam, 1845 - Botany - 509 pages
 

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Page 339 - Herbs or shrubs, 508 609 510 511 503 with a watery juice ; the leaves alternate, compound or divided, usually without stipules. Flowers perfect. Calyx of three to nine sepals, imbricated in one to several rows, often colored. Petals as many as the sepals and in two sets, or twice as many, with a pore, spur, or glandular appendage at the base. Stamens equal in number to the petals and opposite them, or rarely more numerous ; anthers extrorse, the cells commonly opening by an uplifted valve. Carpel...
Page 266 - Lindley raised three raspberry plants from seeds discovered in the stomach of a man whose skeleton was found thirty feet below the surface of the earth, at the bottom of a barrow, or burial mound, which was opened near Dorchester, England. With the body had been buried some coins of the emperor Hadrian...
Page 327 - Candolle) pursue the opposite course, beginning with the most perfect Flowering plants, and concluding with the lowest grade of flowerless plants. The first mode possesses the advantage of ascending by successive steps from the simplest to the most complex structure ; the second, that of passing from the most complete 'and best understood to the most reduced and least known forms ; or, in other words, from the easiest to the most difficult; and is therefore the best plan for the student.
Page 316 - ... or description of each group, when fully given, actually expresses all the known particulars in which the plants it embraces agree among themselves, and differ from other groups of the same rank. This complete analysis being carried through the system, from the primary divisions down to the species, it is evident that the study of a single plant of each group will give a correct general idea of the structure, habits, and even the sensible properties, of the whole.
Page 316 - ... particulars; and to combine the subordinate groups into larger natural assemblages, and these into still more comprehensive divisions, so as to embrace the whole vegetable kingdom in a methodical arrangement. All the characters which plants present, that is, all the points of agreement or difference, are employed in their classification ; those which are common to the greatest number of plants being used for the primary grand divisions ; those less comprehensive for subordinate groups, &c. ;...
Page 124 - ... Alternate leaves are seldom placed one above the other on exactly opposite points of the stem ; but the second leaf will be found to arise a little to the right or left of the opposite point, and the third, a little on one side of the perpendicular to the first; so that, in the apple and pear tree, it is Only when we reach the sixth leaf, that we find one placed exactly over any of the five preceding. The sixth, in this instance, is found to be inserted directly over the first, the seventh over...
Page 71 - Structure, In the second case the new woody matter is intermingled with the old, or deposited towards the centre, which becomes more and more occupied with the woody threads as the stem grows older; and increase in diameter, so far as it depends on the formation of new wood, generally takes place by the gradual distention of the whole, the new wood pushing the old outwards. Accordingly, these stems are said to exhibit the ENDOGENOUS structure or growth ; and such plants are called ENDOGENOUS PLANTS,...
Page 216 - When, therefore, in accordance with these theoretic views, the floral organs are termed modified or metamorphosed leaves, it is not to be supposed that a petal has ever actually been a green leaf, and has subsequently assumed a more delicate texture and hue, or that stamens and pistils have previously existed in the state of foliage ; but only that what is fundamentally one and the same organ developes, in the progressive evolutions of the plant, under any of these various forms. When the individual...
Page 132 - The quantity of water exhaled from the leaves during active vegetation is very great. In one of the well-known experiments of Hales, a Sunflower three and a half feet high, with a surface of...
Page 158 - While animals consume the oxygen of the air, and give back carbonic acid which is injurious to their life, this carbonic acid is the principal element of the food of vegetables, is consumed and decomposed by them, and its oxygen restored for the use of animals.

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