MEMBER OF THE IMPERIAL ACADEMY NATURE CURIOSORUM; OF THE AND PROFESSOR OF BOTANY IN THE UNIVERSITY OF LONDON. With Six Copper-Plates and numerous Mood-Engravings. LONDON: PRINTED FOR LONGMAN, REES, ORME, BROWN, GREEN, & LONGMAN, PATERNOSTER-ROW. Two hundred and ninety years have now elapsed since one of the earliest introductions to Botany upon record was published, in four pages folio, by Leonhart Fuchs, a learned physician of Tubingen. At that period Botany was nothing more than the art of distinguishing one plant from another, and of remembering the medical qualities, sometimes real, but more frequently imaginary, which experience, or error, or superstition, had ascribed to them. Little was known of Vegetable Physiology, nothing of Vegetable Anatomy, and even the art of arranging species systematically had still to be discovered; while scarcely a trace existed of those modern views which have raised the science from the mere business of the herb-gatherer to a station among the most intellectual branches of natural philosophy. It now comprehends a knowledge not only of the names and uses of plants, but of their external and internal organisation, and of their anatomy and physiological phenomena; it embraces a consideration of the plan upon which those multitudes of vegetable forms that clothe the earth have been created, of the skilful combinations out of which so many various organs have emanated, of the laws that regulate the dispersion and location of species, and of the influence that climate exercises upon their developement; and, lastly, from botany as now understood, in its most extensive signification, is inseparable the knowledge of the various ways in which the laws of vegetable life are applicable to the augmentation of the luxuries and comforts, or to the diminution of the wants and miseries of mankind. It is by no means, as some suppose, a science for the idle philosopher in his closet; neither is it merely an amusing accomplishment, as others appear to think; on the contrary, its field is in the midst of meadows, and gardens, and forests, on the sides of mountains, and in the depths of mines, wherever vegetation still flourishes, or wherever it attests by its remains the existence of a former world. It is the science that converts the useless or noxious weed into the nutritious vegetable; which changes a bare volcanic rock, like Ascension, into a green and fertile island; and which enables the man of science, by the power it gives him of judging how far the productions of one climate are susceptible of cultivation in another, to guide the colonist in his enterprises, and to save him from those errors and losses into which all such persons unacquainted with Botany are liable to fall. This science, finally, it is which teaches the physician how to discover in every region the medicines that are best adapted for the maladies that prevail in it; and which, by furnishing him with a certain clue to the knowledge of the tribes in which particular proper. ties are or are not to be found, renders him as much at ease, alone and seemingly without resources, in a land of unknown herbs, as if he were in the midst of a magazine of drugs in some civilised country. The principles of such a science must necessarily be extremely complicated, and in certain branches, which have only for a short time occupied the atten |