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Updated: May 19, 2025
But those who are disposed to believe in this doctrine should study the evidence brought forward in its support by M. Broca, its latest and ablest advocate, and compare this evidence with that which the botanists, as represented by a Gaertner, or by a Darwin, think it indispensable to obtain before they will admit the infertility of crosses between two allied kinds of plants.
Whoever reads the journals, from whatever point of view, is amazed by what they reveal. Geographers, ethnologists, botanists, geologists, Indian traders, and men of affairs, all are of one mind upon this point. We must wait long before we find the work of Lewis and Clark equaled.
Some of them were soldiers, anxious to win fame by feats of arms in a new land; some were missionaries, professing an anxiety for the souls of such heathen as they might encounter, but even these men were not unfamiliar with the use of the sword; some were physicians, as ready to kill as to heal; some were botanists, who knew as much about the rapier and the poniard as they did about the stamens, pistils, and petals of the flowers; and some were reporters, men selected to write the history of the expedition.
There is a sense in which it is true and the analogy was pointed out very many years ago by some French botanists and chemists there is a sense in which it is true that every plant is substantially an enormous aggregation of bodies similar to yeast cells, each having to a certain extent its own independent life.
Now this little Selaginella is of all living plants the one most like some of the gigantic trees of the coal-forests. These trees are called by botanists Lepidodendrons, or scaly trees; there are numbers of them in all coal-mines, and one trunk has been found 49 feet long. Their branches were divided in a curious forked manner and bore cones at the ends.
However bare and simple this definition of species may appear to be, we confidently appeal to all practical naturalists, whether zoologists, botanists, or palaeontologists, to say if, in the vast majority of cases, they know, or mean to affirm, anything more of the group of animals or plants they so denominate than what has just been stated.
Botanists state that Nicotiana rustica had a much greater nicotine content and sprouted or branched more than that cultivated today.
But, upon inquiry of an ingenious person long resident in China, I learned that the Japan camphor is by no means a factitious substance, but the genuine produce of a tree growing in abundance in the latter country, different in every character from that of Sumatra or Borneo, and well known to our botanists by the name of Laurus camphora, L. He further informed me that the Chinese never mix the Sumatran camphor with that from Japan, but purchase the former for their own use, at the before-mentioned extravagant price, from an idea of its efficacy, probably superstitious, and export the latter as a drug not held in any particular estimation.
For not only the English ferns, but the natural history of all our land species, are now well-nigh exhausted. Our home botanists and ornithologists are spending their time now, perforce, in verifying a few obscure species, and bemoaning themselves, like Alexander, that there are no more worlds left to conquer.
Thereafter followed for me a strangely peaceful, idyllic day all save its ending. Looking back on it, I know that the sun which set that evening went down on the last of my happiness. But it all seems trivial now. My companions were accomplished botanists, and here, for the first time, I found myself on common ground with both.
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