Plants and Man: a Series of Essays relating to the Botany of Ordinary Life

Abstract

IF an extra-terrestrial observer, gifted with super-human powers of ocular accommodation and unhampered by human prejudices as to man's position in the scheme of things, were given the opportunity of surveying with detachment the myriad-patterned pellicle of life that invests the earth, the function of the human species might afford him material for confusing speculation. As he gazed on some parts of the planet he might be driven to entertain an Erewhonian conception of man's relation to machinery, but, surveying the greater part of the land surface, he might well be excused for concluding that man's chief function was the distribution of certain dominant species of plants, for he would see almost everywhere men toiling to spread the triumphant grasses and a host of other less dominant but still powerful green organisms. In this view of man's relation to plants, our extra-planetary philosopher would not be without a certain amount of human concurrence, for to a large section of humanity a seductive species of Rosaces represents the primal cause of man's introduction to that distasteful (?) form of activity known as work.

Plants and Man: a Series of Essays relating to the Botany of Ordinary Life.

By Prof. F. O. Bower. Pp. xii + 365. (London: Macmillan and Co., Ltd., 1925.) 14s. net.