Botany: the Science of Plant Life

Volume Thirteen

P. F. COLLIER & SON COMPANY NEW YORK

Copyright 1922 BY P. F. COLLIER & SON COMPANY

MANUFACTURED IN U. S. A.

BOTANY

THE SCIENCE OF PLANT LIFE

NORMAN TAYLOR

CURATOR, BROOKLYN BOTANIC GARDEN

P. F. COLLIER & SON COMPANY NEW YORK

PREFACE

This book is for those who want some general knowledge of the plant world, without necessarily caring for the technical details upon which such knowledge is based. If it leaves the reader with an impulse to follow the subject further than has been possible here, it will have more than fulfilled its mission.

Throughout the book, it has often been convenient to refer to plants or their behavior in terms implying reasoning faculties. Of course, plants are never reasoning things, reasonable as many of their actions appear to be, and to ascribe such qualities to them is to saddle them with attributes perfectly foreign to the plant world. But the description of them in the terms of our everyday speech, the translation of plant behavior into the current conceptions of mankind, does so fix these in our minds that they cease to be among those interesting things that nearly everyone forgets. I have followed this method deliberately, understanding perfectly the objections to it, but believing, with the late C. E. Bessey, that in popular books “it is an admirable way of looking at some botanical things.”

All of the half-tone illustrations, except two, are from the photographic collections of the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, and I am under the greatest obligation to the director of that institution for permission to publish them here. The illustration of the living and fossil algæ has been taken from Prof. Henry Fairfield Osborn’s “Origin and Evolution of Life,” with his kind permission. The illustration of desert vegetation is from a photograph by the late E. L. Morris, and kindly loaned from the collection of the Brooklyn Museum. All the line cuts in the text are from drawings made specially for this book by my wife, Bertha Fanning Taylor.

While grateful and particular acknowledgments can be made for the illustrations, it is difficult or impossible to properly express my indebtedness to all those who, through their books and pamphlets, have indirectly aided in the making of this book. It would involve the mention of most of the better known writers of the books found in the larger botanical libraries. It is a pleasure to acknowledge help from Dr. M. A. Howe of the New York Botanical Garden on the literature of fossil and hot-spring algæ, and from Dr. Orland E. White of the Brooklyn Botanic Garden for helpful criticism of the section dealing with “How Plants Change Their Characters.”

NORMAN TAYLOR.

BROOKLYN BOTANIC GARDEN 20th October, 1920

CONTENTS

CHAPTER PAGE

INTRODUCTORY--PLANTS AND OUR DAILY NEEDS 9

I. WHAT PLANTS ARE 13

II. PLANT BEHAVIOR 76

III. HOW PLANTS PRODUCE THEIR YOUNG 116

IV. THE FAMILIES OF FLOWERING PLANTS AND THEIR RELATIONSHIP 168

V. USES OF PLANTS TO MAN 208

VI. GARDEN PLANTS 267

VII. HISTORY OF THE PLANT KINGDOM 298

VIII. DISTRIBUTION OF PLANTS 337

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

THE PRICKLY PEAR OF THE DESERT IN THE AMERICAN SOUTHWEST Frontispiece

FACING PAGE BANYAN--A FIG TREE OF INDIA 32

LACELEAF--A SUBMERGED AQUATIC PLANT 33

ROOT HAIRS WITH FINE SOIL PARTICLES ATTACHED 33

AERIAL ROOTS OF FIG TREES 64

VENUS’S FLYTRAP--AN INSECTIVOROUS PLANT 65

INDIAN PIPE--A SAPHROPHYTIC PLANT 96

PARTRIDGE BERRY--A TRAILING VINE 96

RAFFLESIA, THE LARGEST FLOWER IN THE WORLD 97

TALIPOT PALM OF CEYLON 128

TRAVELERS’ TREE, A PLANT OF THE BANANA FAMILY 129

WIND-BLOWN POLLEN OF THE JAPANESE RED PINE 160

COCONUT GROVE IN THE PHILIPPINE ISLANDS 161

TRANSPLANTING RICE IN JAVA 192

TEA ESTATE IN CEYLON 193

BANANA PLANTATION IN FRUIT 224

RICE TERRACES IN CHINA 225

FOREST OF THE TEMPERATE ZONE 256

LUXURIANT VEGETATION OF A TROPICAL RAIN FOREST 257

FOSSIL AND LIVING ALGÆ COMPARED 320

LANDSCAPE OF THE CARBONIFEROUS AGE 321

DESERT PLANTS OF THE SOUTHWEST UNITED STATES 352

CONTEST BETWEEN GRASS LAND AND TREE VEGETATION 353

INTRODUCTORY CHAPTER

PLANTS AND OUR DAILY NEEDS

Perhaps few of us realize that without plants all our modern civilization would be swept away and that upon plants has been built all that we have so far accomplished and everything that we may yet become. The overthrow of any king or republic, the wiping out of all money and finance or any of the manifold evidences of our modern world could not for a moment be compared to what would happen to us with the sudden destruction of plant life from the earth.

Food and drink, the very houses we live in and heat, medicines and drugs, books and pictures, musical instruments and tires for automobiles, all these and hundreds of our daily needs depend upon the fact that plants of many different kinds grow upon the earth and in sufficient amounts to be of importance. It is easy to say in opposition to this that we get much food from animals, that we can drink water, and that neither of these comes from plants. But water would soon be lost to us if forests did not conserve it, and upon pasturage most of our food animals depend for their life. The discovery of a single tree in the mountains of northern South America made possible for white man the malarial regions unfit for him before the advent of quinine. Just before Shakespeare’s time sugar and tea and coffee became regular articles of commerce. Not until the discovery of America was tobacco, Indian corn, chocolate, the pineapple or the potato known to man. Upon the spruce forests in the north depends much of our paper supply, from cotton we get clothes and explosives, from hemp and sisal ropes, from a single kind of Brazilian tree most of our rubber, and from rice a food that sustains nearly half the world.

While it is thus plain enough that life depends upon plants now present upon the earth it may not be so obvious that from certain ancient forests has come the greatest source of artificial heat in the world. Coal is nothing but the partial decomposition of vast forests, living ages before man was first found upon the earth, subsequently buried, and under the earth’s pressure forming soft coal, or where the pressure was severe enough hard coal. When it is remembered that a dead, partly decayed tree is only a fraction of its living size and that coal is found in many parts of the world in tremendous quantities we get a partial glimpse of what our debt is to a great forest that lived in luxuriance no one knows how many millions of years ago, reached its climax, and upon whose embedded remains we depend for heat.

Later on in this book will be given in greater detail some of the plants useful to man and just how we have used them. Hardly any part of the study of the plant kingdom has so much of interest as that dealing with our utilization of the things that grow about us. From the earliest struggles of our half-savage ancestors to grow definite crops rescued from the wild down to our modern nut butter made from the partly fermented meat of the cocoanut and shipped half round the world before it is refined, man has constantly striven to use for his advantage the plants most likely to prove valuable. Countries and empires have been built upon such facts. Even to-day rubber from the Straits Settlements and palm oil from Africa are deciding the economic life of those countries.

But man’s use of plants, in fact his absolute reliance upon them, is not the only reason for attempting to find out more about them, what they are, where they came from, how they live and produce their young. A knowledge of even a small part of such a science opens up a rich field of inquiry involving a concept of plant life of greater interest than mere bread and butter. For those with an eye to see and knowledge to interpret, a landscape with its trees or flowers or marshes may contain a host of hidden secrets of dramatic import. Unfolded before one may be found a spectacle of struggle and strife, quiet tragedies of the forest, the inexorable pressure of plants upon their neighbors, the woods upon the prairies or an apparently forlorn hope of some plant living in a hot desert or upon some icy mountain peak. And while these rather obvious things are happening how much more is hidden of the adjustments that leaves or flowers or roots or other organs of the plant are constantly making to the conditions about them. Upon the perfection of such adjustments to light, heat, or water, for instance, depends their very existence. Mistakes are fatal, the forces of nature seem peculiarly relentless, and it is literally a case where many are called but few chosen. Of the untold millions of seeds produced each year few ever grow, yet out of this enormous wastage springs all that makes the earth not only habitable but the beautiful panorama of vegetation to which we are so accustomed that it is nearly taken for granted.

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