. A history of the vegetable kingdom; embracing the physiology of plants, with their uses to man and the lower animals, and their application in the arts, manufactures, and domestic economy. Illus. by several hundred figures. Botany; Botany, Economic; 1855. 66 HISTORY OF THE VEGKTABLE KINGDOM. the enveloping of the young fruit may be all distinctly perceived. The peach tree produces its flowers in April, hut if a hud is dissected in the month of February preceding, the whole of the parts of fructification may be perceived in miniature, wrapped up in the calyx by the overlopping of its division
. A history of the vegetable kingdom; embracing the physiology of plants, with their uses to man and the lower animals, and their application in the arts, manufactures, and domestic economy. Illus. by several hundred figures. Botany; Botany, Economic; 1855. 66 HISTORY OF THE VEGKTABLE KINGDOM. the enveloping of the young fruit may be all distinctly perceived. The peach tree produces its flowers in April, hut if a hud is dissected in the month of February preceding, the whole of the parts of fructification may be perceived in miniature, wrapped up in the calyx by the overlopping of its divisions. The coroUa is ex- tremely small, hut the stamens and pistils are very perceptible, and the pollen may even be discerned in the anthers. If a bud producing both leaf and flower, is taken and dissected in the foregoing manner, the rudiments of its future products may be also distinctly perceived long before the period of its evolution. A bud of the horse chestnut about the size of a pea, dissected in the winter, exhibited four branch leaves covering a flower like spike, consisting of up- wards of sixty florets. Another bud opened in the spring, contained, amid sixteen scales, a pair of opposite leaves, with the divisions closely matted together by a fine do%'ni; within there was a flower spike, consisting of not less than a hundred florets closely crowded together, each enveloped by its downy calyx, which on being opened, disclosed the corolla, stamens, and pistO, with the rudiments of the future fruit distinctly visible in the ovary. The petals of the corolla, before their evolution, are wrapped up in a flower bud, like the young leaves of the plant in the leaf bud, and are also found to exhibit similar varieties of envolution. The flower, like the leaf, is a temporary part of the plant, and takes its rise either from the extre- mities of the branches immediately from the stem, or the root, and sometimes from a leaf. It is the apparatus appropriated by nature for the produc-
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