Fathers Of Botany

Focussing on the lives of four great French missionary botanists as well as a group of other French priests, Franciscan missionaries, and a single German Protestant pastor who all amassed significant plant collections, the author unearths a lost chapter of botanical history.

The first to come upon the bounty of Chinese flowers were Catholic missionary priests who were also remarkable botanists. They spent hours collecting in their districts, and sending dry specimens back to European botanists. Many of the plants they discovered carry their names, but few know of the David behind Davidia involucrata, or the Hugonis of Rosa hugonis. The chapters in this work focus primarily on the lives of four great French missionary botanists--Pere Armand David, Pere Jean Marie Delavay, Pere Guilaume Farges, and Pere Jean Andre Soulie--and also a group of other French priests and Franciscan missionaries who collected, in addition to one German pastor, the only Protestant missionary to make significant plant collections. Pere David is among the best known, having discovered the Giant Panda, but the others have disappeared into the thick of history. This book will help ensure that today's gardeners and botanists appreciate the debt owed to this obscure group, drawing on their journals, drawings, and other historical documents.

This book begins with a lesson on the nature of botany and the process of classifying plants. It then discusses the development of plants from seeds, the reproduction processes in plants, the way plants make their food, and how plants get their water and nutrients and distribute them throughout the body of the plant. As students study these topics, they also learn about many different kinds of plants in creation and where they belong in the plant classification system. The activities and projects use easy-to-find household items and truly make the lessons come alive! They include making a "light hut" in which to grow plants, dissection of a bean seed, growing seeds in plastic bags to watch the germination process, making a leaf skeleton, observing how plants grow towards light, measuring transpiration, forcing bulbs to grow out of season, and forcing pine cones to open and close. We recommend that you spend the entire school year covering this book.

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1890 edition. Excerpt: ... CHAPTER II. Art1f1c1al Systems And Term1nology Of Organs From Cesalp1no To L1nnaeus. 1 S83-176o. Wh1le botany was being developed in Germany and the Netherlands in the manner described in the previous chapter, and long before this process of development reached its furthest point in Kaspar Bauhin, Andrea Cesalp1no in Italy was laying down the general plan, on which the further advance of descriptive botany was to proceed in the 17 th and till far into the 18th century; all that was done in the 17th century in Germany, England, and France towards furthering morphology and systematic botany was done with a reference to Cesalpino's principles, whether these were accepted and made use of, or whether it was sought to refute them. This connection with Cesalpino became gradually less close and less obvious, being concealed by new points of view and by the increase of material for observation; but Cesalpino's ideas on the theoretical principles of systematic botany and the nature of plants appear so plainly, even in the views of Linnaeus, that no one can read both authors without lighting not unfrequently upon passages in Linnaeus'Fundamenta' or in his 'Philosophia Botanica, ' which remind him of Cesalpino, and even upon sentences borrowed from him. As we saw in Kaspar Bauhin the close of the course of development commenced by Fuchs and Bock, so we may regard Linnaeus as having built up and completed the edifice of doctrine founded by Cesalpino. Cesalpino comes before us, in strong contrast with the simple-minded empiricism of the German fathers of botany, as the thinker in presence of the vegetable world. Their main task was the amassing descriptions of individual plants. Cesalpino made the material gathered by experience the subject of earnest..

A great collection of the lives of important botanists throughout time, this book is part biography and part vignette.

From the bestselling author of The Invention of Nature, a fascinating look at the Founding Fathers like none you've seen before. “Illuminating and engrossing.... The reader relives the first decades of the Republic ... through the words of the statesmen themselves.” —The New York Times Book Review For the Founding Fathers, gardening, agriculture, and botany were elemental passions: a conjoined interest as deeply ingrained in their characters as the battle for liberty and a belief in the greatness of their new nation. Founding Gardeners is an exploration of that obsession, telling the story of the revolutionary generation from the unique perspective of their lives as gardeners, plant hobbyists, and farmers. Acclaimed historian Andrea Wulf describes how George Washington wrote letters to his estate manager even as British warships gathered off Staten Island; how a tour of English gardens renewed Thomas Jefferson’s and John Adams’s faith in their fledgling nation; and why James Madison is the forgotten father of environmentalism. Through these and other stories, Wulf reveals a fresh, nuanced portrait of the men who created our nation.