How Does a Tree Grow? Or, Botany for Young Australians

Chapter 2: PREFACE.

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About This Book

A father guides his curious son through basic botany in a conversational frame that explains how plants build wood and grow. The text breaks plant matter into carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen, notes that water combines gases, and describes leaves absorbing atmospheric gases and carbonic acid. It traces nutrients from ash and soil into plants via rootlets, surveys minerals found in plant ash, and shows that different species require different soil foods. The account also examines soil fertility, the effects of overuse or excess richness, and practical manures such as wood ashes, seaweed, and bone dust.

PREFACE.

At the request of several Teachers, I have commenced a Shilling Series of School Books, chiefly to be confined to subjects of Colonial History and Popular Sciences.

The form of dialogue has been adopted with the “Botany for Young Australians,” from a belief that the sympathies of our young friends will be excited on behalf of the juvenile questioner, and their interest thus maintained in the study of the sciences.

A dialogue upon Astronomy will shortly follow; being a conversation between a father and his son, coming out to Australia, from Old England.

JAMES BONWICK.

Melbourne, April 17, 1857.