Excerpt from Structural and Systematic Botany: Being an Arrangement of Plants, Forming a Basis for the Study of Botany, Either on the Linnaean or Natural Systems
The following Treatises are devoted to the consideration of the structure of Plants and Animals; and it has been the aim of the authors to write with scientific accuracy, and with sufficient detail, without introducing discussion upon contested subjects. They trust that the work will be found intelligible to the unlearned, and instructive to those also who have obtained an elementary knowledge of the subjects.
Occasional observations will be met with, by which the reader is reminded that Plants and Animals are not only parts of the same great Creation; but that so closely are some plants associated with the so-called higher kingdom, that no definite line of demarcation can be drawn between them. It is for this reason that the reader is advised to study Botany in connexion with Zoology; and it is probable that a closer acquaintance with the structure and functions of certain parts of plants will ultimately enable us to trace more correct as well as more striking resemblances between the members of the two kingdoms than have as yet been conceived. For example, no nerves, or analogues of nerves, have as yet been found in plants; and yet it is quite clear that not only is a low degree of vital sensibility as universal in plants as in animals; but that in certain instances, as in the sensitive plant, it is developed to a far greater extent than is perceptible in animals taken from the lowest point in the scale of animal life.
This mode of investigation will give greater breadth and interest to the study of Natural History than the more simple and yet more difficult one of studying the parts of plants or of animals as detached points bound together by no universal law; and it is one, moreover, which tends to train the mind to habits of reflection as well as of observation. The authors have endeavoured to aid the mind in this search by introducing a very large number of microscopic and other illustrative engravings, which have the merit of showing the extreme beauty and elegance of design existing in the composition of plants, and offer many new points for analogical comparison with the exquisitely minute structures of animals. A microscope is now as necessary to the naturalist as a telescope to the astronomer.
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