An Introduction to Botany

Excerpt from An Introduction to Botany
Two hundred and ninety years have now elapsed since one of the earliest introductions to Botany upon record was published, in four pages folio, by Leonhart Fuchs, a learned physician of Tubingen. At that period Botany was nothing more than the art of distinguishing one plant from another, and of remembering the medical qualities, sometimes real, but more frequently imaginary, which experience, or error, or superstition, had ascribed to them. Little was known of Vegetable Physiology, nothing of Vegetable Anatomy, and even the mode of arranging species systematically had still to be discovered; while scarcely a trace existed of those modern views which have raised the science from the mere business of the herb-gatherer to a station among the most intellectual branches of natural philosophy.
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