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The Project Gutenberg eBook of Botan, by Norman Taylory

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This is the full text of Botany: The Science of Plant Life by Norman Taylor from Project Gutenberg, used to demonstrate how a Quarto ebook. It is used in relation to the 2022 OLC Accelerate conference talk hosted by Dr. Ryan Straight.

The Project Gutenberg eBook of Botany, by Norman Taylor

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Title: Botany

Subtitle: The Science of Plant Life

Author: Norman Taylor

Release Date: June 14, 2015 [EBook #49211]

Language: English

Credits: Produced by Juliet Sutherland, Chuck Greif and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net

Preface

THIS book is for those who want some general knowledge of the plant world, without necessarily caring for the technical details upon which such knowledge is based. If it leaves the reader with an impulse to follow the subject further than has been possible here, it will have more than fulfilled its mission.

Throughout the book, it has often been convenient to refer to plants or their behavior in terms implying reasoning faculties. Of course, plants are never reasoning things, reasonable as many of their actions appear to be, and to ascribe such qualities to them is to saddle them with attributes perfectly foreign to the plant world. But the description of them in the terms of our everyday speech, the translation of plant behavior into the current conceptions of mankind, does so fix these in our minds that they cease to be among those interesting things that nearly everyone forgets. I have followed this method deliberately, understanding perfectly the objections to it, but believing, with the late C. E. Bessey, that in popular books “it is an admirable way of looking at some botanical things.”

All of the half-tone illustrations, except two, are from the photographic collections of the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, and I am under the greatest obligation to the director of that institution for permission to publish them here. The illustration of the living and fossil algæ has been taken from Prof. Henry Fairfield Osborn’s “Origin and Evolution of Life,” with his kind permission. The illustration of desert vegetation is from a photograph by the late E. L. Morris, and kindly loaned from the collection of the Brooklyn Museum. All the line cuts in the text are from drawings made specially for this book by my wife, Bertha Fanning Taylor.

While grateful and particular acknowledgments can be made for the illustrations, it is difficult or impossible to properly express my indebtedness to all those who, through their books and pamphlets, have indirectly aided in the making of this book. It would involve the mention of most of the better known writers of the books found in the larger botanical libraries. It is a pleasure to acknowledge help from Dr. M. A. Howe of the New York Botanical Garden on the literature of fossil and hot-spring algæ, and from Dr. Orland E. White of the Brooklyn Botanic Garden for helpful criticism of the section dealing with “How Plants Change Their Characters.”

Norman Taylor.

Brooklyn Botanic Garden
20th October, 1920