according to the number of rudimentary leaves in the embryo. The monocotyledons, which have only one seed leaf or cotyledon, include the grasses, sedges, rushes, cat tails, palms, lilies, orchids, etc. These plants usually have leaves with parallel veins and flowers built upon the plan of three. They are also called endogens from the fact that the growth of their stems in thickness is effected not by the addition of external layers, but by the expansion and increased complexity of their internal tissues. The angiosperms, with two seed leaves, are the dicotyledons or exogens, having usually net-veined leaves, and flowers more often upon the plan of five. Exogens include the willows, oaks, elms, pinks, buttercups, mustards, roses, beans, violets, asters, etc.
Classification.—The more noteworthy ancient writers upon plants were Hippocrates (460-357 B. C.), Theophrastus (372-287 B. C.), Pliny (23-79 A. D.), and Dioscorides of the 2d century. The 14th to the 17th centuries produced many botanists of a type known as herbalists, whose often ponderous works contain crude complications of the known sorts of plants, with hints of their uses. During this period the idea of genera among plants was evolved with greater and greater clearness. Linnæus was the first to give to each kind of plant known to him a double designation, consisting of a generic name followed by a specific name, thus: Rosa lucida, Viola pedata, Claytonia Virginiana, Claytonia Caroliniana.
The arrangement of families most generally followed during the 19th century has been that developed by the Genoese botanist, Auguste Gyrame De Candolle, and his son, Alphonse De Candolle. The De Candollean system received its most perfect exposition in the “Genera Plantarum” of the two English botanists, George Bentham (nephew of Jeremy Bentham, the philosopher) and Sir Joseph Dalton Hooker, and was followed in all the systematic writings of Prof. Asa Gray. This system, while undoubtedly possessing great merit in its details, unhappily fails to coincide with what is believed to be the historic sequence in which the different families have been evolved during past geological ages. It is, for this reason, rapidly giving place to a more philosophic system, elaborated by the German botanist, A. W. Eichler (1839-1887) and subsequently developed with great perfection in an extended work upon the “Natural Families of Plants” prepared under the editorship of Professors Engler and Prantl. The system, embracing all plants, begins with the simplest cryptogams and ends with the compositæ, the great family, to which belong the golden rod, aster, thistle, and dandelion.
The subject of vegetable physiology, although dating its beginnings from the observations of Stephen Hales (1677-1761) upon the movement and pressure of sap, made but little advance before 1850. It was from that time greatly stimulated by the acute observation and close reasoning of Charles Darwin in England, and Prof. Julius von Sachs in Germany. Subsequent leaders in this line of investigation have been W. Pfeffer and Edward Strasburger. Anatomical botany is greatly indebted to Anton de Bary. The most meritorious works upon botanical geography, a subject which treats of floral conditions and the distribution of the plants in different countries, have been those of A. H. R. Grisebach, Adolph Engler, and A. F. W. Schimper.
The rapid growth of agricultural colleges in this country, fostered by Government and State aid, has given a great impulse to the study of botany. That branch of it which concerns itself with the diseases of plants, called pathology, has been carried to a point of efficiency not yet reached in any other country. The methods of American botanists have caused systematic botany or taxonomic botany to register great advances during the two decades of the present century. There is now under way a complete revision of North American flora in the light of the geographic relationships of plants. Future progress is likely to be based on the principles of heredity in plants and the correlation of plant functions with plant structure.
BOTANY BAY, a bay of New South Wales, Australia, 5 miles S. of Sydney. It was discovered by Captain Cook, on his first voyage, in 1770, and named by him from the great number of new plants found in its vicinity. In 1787 it received England's first penal colony in the East; and, though it was supplanted the very next year by Port Jackson, yet it long continued to be the popular designation, not merely of this penal settlement, but of the Australian convict settlements generally.
BOTHA, LOUIS, a Boer commander, born in Greytown, Natal, about 1864. He began life as a farmer, and, as a young man, had a share in the establishment of the Transvaal Republic. Later he fought in the Kaffir campaign. He was elected to the Volksraad at Pretoria. Upon the outbreak of the Boer war with
