Elements of botany and vegetable physiology, including the characters of the natural families of plants, with illustrative figures / By A. Richard, M.D. Translated from the fourth edited by W. Macgillivray, A.M.

  • Achille Richard
Date:
1831
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Elements of botany and vegetable physiology, including the characters of the natural families of plants, with illustrative figures / By A. Richard, M.D. Translated from the fourth edited by W. Macgillivray, A.M. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    which it affords for the arrangement of the genera and families, have induced great changes in the study of botany. The cultivators of that science became sensi- ble of the necessity of penetrating still deeper into the organization of the different parts of the flower, and in particular of the ovary, the seed, and the fruit, which, it was perceived, would furnish the most im- portant characters for determining the natural affini- ties of plants. The genera placed together in each of of the hundred natural orders presented in the Genera Plantarum were therefore submitted anew to exami- nation ; and from this more precise analysis, which was directed especially towards the most essential organs, necessarily resulted the discovery of a great number of characters, resemblances and differences, which had previously passed unnoticed. The new impulse thus given to the study of plants, rendered it necessary to introduce modifications both in the circumscription of the genera, the number of which was scon more than doubled, and in that of the families themselves. But in this early period of the new era of botany, it was natural that observers, discovering every day a multi- tude of new modifications which had escaped the no- tice of their predecessors, should be more struck with the differences which they observed between the ge- nera and families, than with the new relations which analysis disclosed. In fact, at this period, the genera, or the species that had been minutely analyzed accord-
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