Reader in Botany: Selected and Adapted from Well-known Authors. From seed to leaf, Part 1

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Ginn & Company, 1889 - 209 pages
 

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Page 96 - But the leaves of the herbage at our feet take all kinds of strange shapes, as if to invite us to examine them. Star-shaped, heart-shaped, spear-shaped, arrow-shaped, fretted, fringed, cleft, furrowed, serrated, sinuated; in whorls, in tufts, in spires, in wreaths endlessly expressive, deceptive, fantastic, never the same from footstalk to blossom; they seem perpetually to tempt our watchfulness, and take delight in outstripping our wonder.
Page 96 - Flowers seem intended for the solace of ordinary humanity : children love them ; quiet, tender, contented ordinary people love them as they grow ; luxurious and disorderly people rejoice in them gathered : They are the cottager's treasure ; and in the crowded town, mark, as with a little broken fragment of rainbow, the windows of the workers in whose heart rests the covenant of peace.
Page 3 - From a remote period, in all parts of the world, man has subjected many animals and plants to domestication or culture. Man has no power of altering the absolute conditions of life : he cannot change the climate of any country ; he adds no new element to the soil ; but he can remove an animal or plant from one climate or soil to another, and give it food on which it did not subsist in its natural state.
Page 138 - The eye that contemplates it well perceives Its glossy leaves Ordered by an intelligence so wise, As might confound the atheist's sophistries. Below, a circling fence, its leaves are seen Wrinkled and keen ; No grazing cattle through their prickly round Can reach to wound ; But as they grow where nothing is to fear, Smooth and unarmed the pointless leaves appear.
Page 45 - It is hardly an exaggeration to say that the tip of the radicle thus endowed, and having the power of directing the movements of the adjoining parts, acts like the brain of one of the lower animals, the brain being seated within the anterior end of the body, receiving impressions from the sense-organs, and directing the several movements.
Page 48 - Our seedling now throws up a stem bearing leaves, and often branches, all of which whilst young are continually circumnutating. If we look, for instance, at a great acacia tree, we may feel assured that every one of the innumerable growing shoots is constantly describing small ellipses ; as is each petiole, sub-petiole, and leaflet. The latter, as well as ordinary leaves, generally move up and down in nearly the same vertical plane, so that they describe very narrow ellipses. The flower-peduncles...
Page 117 - ... phenomenon is of the same nature, and owns the same cause (whatever that may be) as the closing of the leaves of the Sensitive-plant at the touch, and a variety of similar movements observed in plants. The object of this note is to remark that the correctness of this view may be readily demonstrated. For the tendrils in several common plants will coil up more or less promptly after being touched, or brought with a slight force into contact with a foreign body...

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