It must be remembered that botany does not consist in collecting, drying, and drawing plants alone, but it relates to everything about the vegetable kingdom of nature. The growth of the plant from the seed; how it lives, breathes, and its sap circulates; how starch, and sugar, and other products are formed—have to be considered. The manner of unfolding of the flower, the anatomy of its fruits, and of the leaves and stems and root, and the method by which the kind reproduces, and the decay of the plant have to be studied. Then the uses of plants, medicinal and as food, have to be treated. How they can be best grown, and how plants are distributed over the land at different heights, form other subjects; and the arrangement of plants in a classification founded on the similarity of their most important anatomical structures, and constituting what is termed a natural system, is one of the most necessary studies. [Illustration] [Illustration] CHAPTER II. THE RISE OF THE SCIENCE OF PLANTS. John Ray—Joseph de Tournefort—Their lives. The world went to sleep for many centuries, so far as natural history and many other things are concerned, after the time of Pliny, and sixteen hundred years elapsed before any advance was made in botanical knowledge. This was the age when the only light on the earth was struggling Christianity, and it was shaded by superstition and violence. At last men began to learn Greek again, and to read the ancient authors carefully, so that nature began to be studied. A few foreign botanists began to attempt to add to the knowledge the ancients had given them, and to classify plants. But the first man who made a real advance, and whose work has influenced the study of plant life down to the present day, was an Englishman, who was bred in comparative poverty, suffered persecution, and lived a beautiful life.