PART IV.

THE FIVE GREAT CLASSES OF PLANTS

INTRODUCTORY

If you go out into the garden, or fields and woods in summer, and look around you at the plants, you will find that nearly all of them are flowering, or have flower-buds, or have the proof of having had flowers in the shape of fruits and seeds. Even among the few which do not show any of these things, many will probably be plants which you know to be the same as others of their kind which you have seen flowering.

Generally flowers (such as roses and daisies) are easy to see, but in some plants they are less showy, as in the oak, for example, where the little green tails or catkins which come out early in the spring are the flowers. On the whole, however, if you look carefully, you will have no difficulty in seeing proof that ~nearly all of the conspicuous plants of our gardens and woods bear flowers~.

All the same, there are very many other plants, some of them quite easy to see, and others very small and inclined to hide, which do not have flowers at all, and which are so different from the flowering plants that even before you have studied them, you instinctively separate them. The seaweeds or mosses, for example, are at once recognized by any one as being of a different family from roses and lilies.

When you have studied all the plants carefully, you will see how true is this instinctive separation of the chief families, and how nature seems to have made five principal big families, so that both scientists and quite unlearned people see more or less clearly the limits she has set to each.

The family which is most highly advanced is that of the flowering plants, but the others, too, are well worth study, and we will now notice some of the points about their structure which are characteristic of each of the families.