An introduction to physiological and systematical botany / by James Edward Smith.

  • James Edward Smith
Date:
1814
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: An introduction to physiological and systematical botany / by James Edward Smith. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the National Library of Medicine (U.S.), through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the National Library of Medicine (U.S.)

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    CHAPTER III. * OF THE CUTICLE Oli EPIDERMIS. Every part of a living plant is covered with a skin or membrane called the cuticle, which same denomination has been given by anatomists to the scarf skin that cov- ers the animal body, protecting it from the injuries of the air, and allowing of due absorption and perspiration through its pores. There is the most striking analogy between the animal and the vegetable cuticle. In the former, it varies in thickness from the exquisitely delicate film which covers the eye, to the hard skin of the hand or foot, or the far coarser covering of a Tortoise or Rhinoceros; in the latter it is equally delicate on the parts of a flower, and scarcely less hard on the leaves of the Pearly Aloe, or coarse on the trunk of a Plane tree. In the numerous layers of this membrane continually peeling off from the Birch, we see a resemblance to the scales which separate from the shell of a Tortoise. By maceration, boiling, or putrefaction, this part is separable from the plant as well as from the animal, being, if not absolutely incorruptible, much less prone to decomposition than the parts it covers.(2) The vital principle, as far as we can judge, seems to be extinct in it. (2) [The durability of the epidermis may every year be ob- served in our woods, where cylinders of birch bark, ate found in a state of perfect preservation, long after the wood within them has decayed.]