Maxwell Tylden Masters

Botany for Beginners: an Introduction to the Study of Plants Maxwell Tylden Masters

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1872 edition. Excerpt: ...his knowledge of the marvels of Creation. We have alluded to these matters in this place, not with any view of following them up, for that would demand far too much space, but simply to indicate to the beginner what fields of knowledge lie before him, if he will but choose to enter them, and to urge him to take no contracted views of botanical science--to look beyond the collecting box, the magnifying glass, and the herbarium, and the minute distinctions of the text-books and Floras, and to consider all these as means to an end--invaluable as aids, but not to be confounded with the object to be attained. We do not know any group of plants better calculated to serve as illustrations of the facts and phenomena of plantlife than Orchids. Vegetable conformation and minute structure, physiology, or the office of all the several parts of the plants, singly or in unison, the phenomena of geographical distribution--each and all of these involving questions of direct practical importance to the plant grower, the food producer, the merchant--are to be studied under favourable conditions in the Orchids. Here we must limit ourselves strictly to the consideration of sundry salient features in the construction of these plants. Our illustration (fig. 47) shows the flower of one of the many Orchids which, growing on trees, but not in them, are called epiphytes. Unlike the Mistleto, unlike the Orobanches, and a host of moulds and fungusblights, which penetrate the tissues of the plant on which they grow, and feed on its juices, and which are therefore fitly called parasites, the Orchids simply use the bough on which they grow as a vantage ground for obtaining that light and air and water on which they feed. Once conveyed into the laboratory, changes, only half...