Publisher's Synopsis
Excerpt from The Principles of Botany, as Exemplified in the Cryptogamia: For the Use of Schools and Colleges
We are accustomed to admire the magnificent spectacle of the starry heavens 5 but let us look on the earth, at the splen dors of the vegetable creation. From the lowly Moss which raises its little sporangia hardly an inch above the ground, and covers with its minute, but exquisitely beautiful foliage, the rugged rocks and the bark of trees, to the noble arborescent Ferns of the tropics, from whose lofty summit a magnificent bouquet of gigantic fronds is gracefully pendent; from the little inconspicuous aquatic plant, called the Duckmeat, which covers the surface of the pools and stagnant waters with its scumlike vegetation, to the splendid Victoria Regia, the queen of water-lilies, cradled in the rolling billows of the mighty Amazon - what differences in size! What an advance in organic development! Yet nature has every intermediate variety of organization, passing, as we shall presently show, from the utmost simplicity to the sublimest grandeur of vegetable structure, through a beautiful and highly instructive series of transition-forms.
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