How Plants Grow: A Simple Introduction to Structural Botany

Asa Gray

“Asa Gray is considered the most important American botanist of the 19th century” (read more at Wikipedia).

Indeed, from the 1840s until well into the twentieth century, Gray's textbooks shaped botanical education in the United States. One of these influential texts was How Plants Grow: A Simple Introduction to Structural Botany, written for young people. Perhaps because these readers could not be expected to have previous knowledge, Gray's explanations are helpfully thorough -- but don't imagine that the subject matter has been "dumbed-down"!

From the book... “Considering of plants inquiringly and intelligently is the study of Botany....
       “Interesting as this study is to all, it must be particularly so to Young People. It appeals to their natural curiosity, to their lively desire of knowing about things: it calls out and directs (i.e. educates) their powers of observation, and is adapted to sharpen and exercise, in a very pleasant way, the faculty of discrimination.
       “To learn how to observe and how to distinguish things correctly, is the greater part of education, and is that in which people otherwise well educated are apt to be surprisingly deficient. Natural objects, everywhere present and endless in variety, afford the best field for practice; and the study when young, first of Botany, and afterwards of other Natural Sciences, as they are called, is the best training that can be in these respects. This study ought to begin even before the study of language.
       “For to distinguish things scientifically (that is, carefully and accurately) is simpler than to distinguish ideas. And in Natural History the learner is gradually led from the observation of things, up to the study of ideas or the relations of things.”

NameThatPlant is pleased to present a two-chapter excerpt from Gray’s How Plants Grow, a high school textbook first published in 1858 and in use into the early 20th century. (This would not have been possible without the help of volunteer Eva Pratt, who carefully proofread the jumbled text delivered by my optical character recognition software. Thank you, Eva!)

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