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Popular Cyclopaedia of Natural Science (By W.B. Carpenter).
Popular Cyclopaedia of Natural Science - By W.B. Carpenter Author:William Benjamin Carpenter Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER II. GENERAL VIEW OF THE VEGETABLE KINGDOM. 12. When we examine, however cursorily, the nature of the Plants around us, we at once perceive that the... more »ir growth and succession are regulated by certain laws. Thus we observe that all have a period of life to which they are more or less closely limited. Many of our commonest cultivated vegetables,—the Corn, the Beans, the Turnips of our fields, and many of the plants which enrich our gardens with their flowers,—live but for a single summer ; springing up from seed, uprearing a lofty stem, putting forth expanded and luxuriant foliage, and unfolding gay and numerous blossoms, and finally withering away and undergoing complete decay, in the course of a few months. In others, on the contrary, the duration of life is so great that it seems to be unlimited ; but there is good reason to believe that the forest trees which lift their massive stems to the light of day through a succession of many hundred years, have an appointed limit to their lives as regular as that of man,—varying, like his, in individual cases, according to the circumstances of each. Every plant, then, has a period allotted by the great Creator of all, for its springing from seed, the unfolding of its leaves, the expansion of its blossoms, and its subsequent death and decay; but while death is the lot of each generation that " cometh up and is withered," the perpetuation of the race is accomplished by another law, which provides for the production by each individual, before its own dissolution, of the germs of new individuals, from which plants may arise, that go through their allotted period of life, and in their turn decay after producing the germs of a succeeding generation. 13. Now besides these evident laws, another may be detected by a little observatio...« less