The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Elements of Botany, by Asa Gray

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Title: The Elements of Botany
For Beginners and For Schools

Author: Asa Gray

Release Date: September 18, 2010 [EBook #33757]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

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GRAY'S LESSONS IN BOTANY

REVISED EDITION

THE
ELEMENTS OF BOTANY

FOR BEGINNERS AND FOR SCHOOLS

By ASA GRAY

IVISON, BLAKEMAN, AND COMPANY
NEW YORK AND CHICAGO

_Copyright_,
By Asa Gray.
1887.

PREFACE.

This volume takes the place of the author's Lessons in Botany and
Vegetable Physiology, published over a quarter of a century ago. It is
constructed on the same lines, and is a kind of new and much revised
edition of that successful work. While in some respects more extended,
it is also more concise and terse than its predecessor. This should the
better fit it for its purpose now that competent teachers are common.
They may in many cases develop paragraphs into lectures, and fully
illustrate points which are barely, but it is hoped clearly, stated.
Indeed, even for those without a teacher, it may be that a condensed is
better than a diffuse exposition.

The book is adapted to the higher schools, "How Plants Grow and Behave"
being the "Botany for Young People and Common Schools." It is intended
to ground beginners in Structural Botany and the principles of vegetable
life, mainly as concerns Flowering or Phanerogamous plants, with which
botanical instruction should always begin; also to be a companion and
interpreter to the Manuals and Floras by which the student threads his
flowery way to a clear knowledge of the surrounding vegetable creation.
Such a book, like a grammar, must needs abound in technical words, which
thus arrayed may seem formidable; nevertheless, if rightly apprehended,
this treatise should teach that the study of botany is not the learning
of names and terms, but the acquisition of knowledge and ideas. No
effort should be made to commit technical terms