A new family herbal, or, A history & description of all the British and foreign plants, which are useful to man. Either as food, medicine, farming purposes, or in the arts and manufactures, / compiled from the works of Hill, Woodville, Don, Withering, and other botanists, by Richard Brook.

  • Brook, Richard, active 19th century.
Date:
[1853?]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: A new family herbal, or, A history & description of all the British and foreign plants, which are useful to man. Either as food, medicine, farming purposes, or in the arts and manufactures, / compiled from the works of Hill, Woodville, Don, Withering, and other botanists, by Richard Brook. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    A perfect plant is composed of a root, of a stem, with its branches, of leaves, flowers and fruit: we will begin with the flower, for upon this part nearly the whole system of Botany depends, and iustly so, as it is the least liable to variation. Take a Lily; before it opens, you will observe the flower has the form of an oblong greenish bud, which becomes whiter the nearer it is to opening, and when it is quite open, you perceive that the white cover takes the form of a cup, divided at the top into several half circles, or segments; this is called the corolla, and not the flower, as some ignorantly call it, because the flower is composed of several parts, of which the corolla is only one, al- though the principle part. The corolla of the lily is not all of one piece, as you will easily see,—as you may separate it into six distinct pieces, these are the petals. A corolla consisting of several petals is called a Polypetalous corolla, from the Greek word polus, which means many. If it were all of one piece like the Bell flower, (Campanula) and others of the kind, it would be called Monopetalous, from the Greek word mono which means one. You will find exactly in the middle of the corolla, a sort of little column, rising from the bottom and pointing directly upwards; this is called the Pistil, it is divided by Botanists into three parts: 1st. the swollen base with its three blunted angles called the germ or ovary, 2nd. a thread placed upon the style, >'3rd. the style itself crowned by a sort of capital, with three notches : this is called the stigma. Between the pistil and the corolla, you will find six other bodies, standing in a sort of circle at equal distances round the ovary ; these are *4e stamens or