Research Results For 'Bast'

BAST

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BAST

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BAUNINIA

Bauninia (named after the Swiss botanist Gaspard Bauhin) is a genus of plants of the order Leguminosae. They are usually twiners, found in the woods of hot countries, and often stretching from tree to tree like cables. Many are showy and interesting. The bark of Bauninia variegata is used in tanning; the bast fibres of some Indian species are made into ropes and twine.
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BYTTNERIACEAE

Byttneriaceae is a natural order of plants allied to the mallows. Almost all the species contain a fatty oil in their seeds, and have a fibrous bast. The typical genus is Byttneria, from which the order is named, but by far the most important is Theobroma to which the tree yielding cocoa (cacao) belongs.
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CAT

The cat is a genus of highly sophisticated, intelligent and paradoxical carnivorous mammals (Felidae or Felis). The genus includes the most highly specialized of the carnivores. The mechanism by which the claws are retracted (in some species) is highly sophisticated, and the claws are extremely sharp and powerful weapons. The teeth number thirty, and are used to tear meat which is then swallowed without mastication. The tongue is rough and functions as a rasp.

Cats have been domesticated since the earliest of times, and were considered sacred to the goddess Bast by the ancient Egyptians. Generally people either like cats and dislike dogs, or dislike cats and like dogs, reflecting the two very different, opposing natures of the two animals. Where as dogs are loyal, trainable and generally giving, cats are highly independent. Coming and going as they see fit, and often giving the impression that the owner of a pet cat is actually the pet himself! It is this independence that makes cats so attractive as a pet to many people.

Cats are renowned for their intelligence, and sensitivity, but are also completely daft at times, behaving not unlike a small child playing with pieces of string or chasing their tail. At times affectionate, and at others aloof and arrogant, but always mysterious and amusing as was reflected in the very perceptive American 'Fat Freddy's Cat' comic books which were published during the 1970s and 1980s. Almost all species of cat purr, though not tigers, and the sound of purring has been found to trigger the healing process in the cats bones, and also strengthen human bones. It is thought that cats purr for a number of reasons, most obviously as an expression of contentment, and also as a method of self-healing, which may account for their remarkable resilience to injury, being able to fall great distances and survive.

Cats, particularly tigers and Siamese, do talk to each other, and to any human prepared to listen, communicating in numerous growls and meows, though as yet their language is not understood.

The male cat is called a Tom, but was formerly called a Gilbert or gib.
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BAST

Bast was an ancient Egyptian goddess. She was represented as a woman with the head of a lion or cat, and the cat was sacred to her. She is depicted carrying a sistrum in her right hand, a breastplate in her left hand and a small bag over her left arm. The cult of Bast was popular around Bubastis and later at Memphis. The Romans also took the cult back to Rome, Ostia, Nemi and Pompeii.
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BASTET

Bastet was the earlier form of the Egyptian goddess later known as Bast.
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UBASTI

In Egyptian mythology, Ubasti was a form of the goddess Bast. In the form Ubasti she was the goddess of the kindly sun, merriment, mental-health, music and dance. The guardian of pregnant women.
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BOTANY

Botany or phytology is the science of the vegetable kingdom. Plants may be studied from several different points of view. The consideration of their general form and structure, and the comparison of these in the various groups from the lowest to the highest, constitutes morphology. Anatomy and histology treat respectively of the bulkier and the more minute internal structure of the parts, and physiology of their functions. Systematic botany considers the arrangement of plants in groups and sub-groups according to the greater or less degree of resemblance between them. Geographical botany tells of their distribution on the earth's surface, and strives to account for the facts observed, while palaeobotany bears the same relation to distribution in the successive geological strata which make up the earth's crust. Economic botany comprises the study of the products of the vegetable kingdom as regards their use to man.

The simplest plants are very minute, and can only be studied by use of the compound microscope. A little rain-water which has been standing some time when thus examined is found to contain a number of roundish green objects, each of which is an individual plant, consisting of one cell only, with an external limiting membrane or cell-wall of a substance known as cellulose, within which is granular, viscid protoplasm. The protoplasm is permeated by a green colouring matter, chlorophyll, and embedded in it is an oval, more solid-looking body, the nucleus. Protococcus, as this little plant is called, though so simple, is yet able, by virtue of the living protoplasm, to take up food from the water around it; to work that food up into more cellulose and protoplasm so as to increase in size; and, finally, to produce new individuals, more Protococci. If we imagine Protococcus to elongate considerably and be repeatedly divided across by cell-walls, we get a row or filament of cells, a very common form among the low orders of plants: the masses of green threads seen floating in ditches in the spring and summer consist of such a filamentous plant called Spirogyra. Or we may have a single flat sheet of cells, as in the delicate green sea-weed Viva. Increased complexity of structure is exemplified in many of the ordinary sea-weeds, the stalk and more or less flattened expansions of which are several to many cells thick, the external cell-layers differing somewhat in structure from the internal. But we cannot distinguish in any of these between a stem, leaf, or root, as we can for instance in the more highly differentiated fern. Plants in which such a distinction cannot be drawn are called Thallophytes, and their whole body a thallus.

Thallophytes can be divided into two classes: Algae and Fungi. The former are distinguished by the presence of the green colouring matter chlorophyll, which is of vital importance in the physiology of the plant; sometimes the green colour is obscured by the presence of a brown or red compound, as in the brown and red sea-weeds. The Fungi contain no chlorophyll, and also differ in being composed not of expansions or masses of cells like the algae, but of numbers of delicate interlacing tubes or hyphae, often forming, as in the mushroom, quite large and complicated structures.

Lichens are an interesting class between Algae and Fungi, in as much as they are built up of an alga and a fungus, which live together and are mutually dependent on each other. Going a step higher we reach the Mosses, where, for the first time, we distinguish a clear differentiation of the part of the plant above ground into a stem and leaves borne upon it. The stem is attached to the soil by delicate colourless hairs - known as root-hairs. Its structure is, however, very simple, and the leaves are merely thin plates of cells. Rising still higher to the fern-like plants, including Equisetums (Horse-tails) and Lycopods (Club-mosses), we notice a great advance in complexity both of external form and internal structure. The leaves are large, often much branched, the stem stout and firm, while instead of the few simple hairs which was all the indication of a root-system to be found in the moss, there are well-developed true roots. Microscopic examination of sections of stem, leaf, or root, shows great differences in structure between various groups of cells; there is, in fact, marked differentiation of tissues. A tissue is a layer, row, or group of cells which have all undergone a similar development; by differentiation of tissues we mean that various layers, rows, or groups have developed in different ways, so that we can make out and mark by distinctive names the elements of which a stem or leaf is built up.

The structure of thallophytes and mosses is very simple, but in the ferns, besides other well-marked tissues, we meet with one of so great importance in the higher plants, and so constantly present, that it is used as a distinctive characteristic of all the plants above the mosses. Ferns and flowering-plants which contain this vascular tissue are known as vascular plants, in contrast to the thallophytes and mosses, or cellular plants, where it is not found. Microscopical examination of a very thin longitudinal slice of the stem, root, or leaf-stalk of a vascular plant shows bundles of long cells running lengthwise, the walls of which are not uniformly thin, as in the cells making up the groundwork of the portion examined, but are covered with curious markings which are seen ; to represent local thickenings of the walls, thin places, or pits, being left between them. These cells, which are quite empty, are the wood-cells; they are placed end to end, and when, as frequently occurs, the end-walls separating the cavities of two cells become absorbed, a wood vessel is formed. Near the elements of the wood, but differing greatly from them in their delicate unchanged walls and thick viscid contents, are the bast-vessels, or sieve-tubes, so called from the end-to-end communication between two cells being established, not by absorption of the whole wall, but by its perforation at numerous spots forming a sieve arrangement. This combination of wood and bast vessels forms the essential part of what is therefore known as vascular tissue.

Phanerogams, or Flowering-plants, represent the highest group of plants; Seed-plants would be a better name, as their main distinction from those already described is the production of a seed. The much greater variety in form and structure seen in them as compared with the ferns justifies us in regarding them as the highest group in the vegetable kingdom. They are divided into two classes. (1) Those in which the seed is developed on an open leaf, termed a carpel, and called therefore Gymnosperms; and (2) those in which the seed is developed in a closed chamber, formed by the folding together of one or more carpels, and called accordingly Angiosperms. To the former belong the Conifers - pines and firs - and Cycads; to the latter the rest of our trees and the enormous number of field and garden plants which are not ferns or mosses.

Angiosperms again are subdivided into Monocotyledons, where the embryo or young plant contained in the seed has only one primary leaf; and Dicotyledons, where an opposite pair of such leaves is present. Like the last group, Phanerogams are differentiated into a shoot-portion above the ground, consisting of a stem bearing leaves, and a subterranean root-portion. Both stem and root are often copiously branched, so that one individual may cover a large area both above and below ground. Stem, leaves, and roots all show great variety in form and adaptation.

The embryo, or rudimentary plant contained in the seed, consists of a very short axis or stem, bearing one (in Monocotyledons), two (in Dicotyledons), or several (in many Gymnosperms) primary leaves, the cotyledons, above which it terminates in a little bud or plumule, while below them the axis passes into the primary root or radicle. When the seed germinates the radicle is the first to protrude between the separating seed-coats, and growing downwards fixes itself in the aoil. Then the plumule grows out accompanied or not, as the case may be, by the cotyledons, which have hitherto concealed and protected it, and by rapid growth soon develops into a stem bearing leaves. The stem continues growing in length at its apex throughout the life of the plant; at a short distance below the apex growth in length ceases; but while in Gymnosperms and Dicotyledons it also continually increases in thickness through its whole length,

Monocotyledons are distinguished by the fact that when once the stem has been formed its diameter remains unchanged. The same rule applies to the branches. The cause of this difference is found in the internal structure. In the Gymnosperm and Dicotyledon a transverse section in a very young stage has the following appearance: Starting from the outside we have, (1) a single protective layer of cells with thick external walls, the epidermis. (2) Inside this, and forming what is called the cortex, are a number of thin-walled cells arranged like bricks in a wall, or touching only at their rounded edges, and leaving intercellular spaces. Such an arrangement, where there is no dove-tailing between the cells, is called parenchymatous. (3) Within the cortex a ring of vascular bundles, each consisting essentially of a little group of bast-vessels towards the outside and wood-Vessels on the inside, separated by a single layer of cells, the cambium-layer. (4) Within the ring of bundles the pith, of parenchyma like the cortex, and united to it by strands of similar parenchymatous cells passing between the bundles and known as medullary rays. As the young stem grows, however, the spaces between the bundles are filled up by development of fresh bast, cambium, and wood, so that instead of a number of separate bundles there is a complete vascular ring.

The cambium-ring remains in active growth throughout the whole life of the plant, and by producing new bast on the outside and wood on the inside causes continual increase in thickness. The epidermis, which would of course soon give way beneath the strain of the growth inside, is replaced as a protective layer by the bark, development of which keeps pace with increase in diameter. Now in the young monocotyledonous stem, instead of a few bundles arranged in a ring separating pith from cortex, a great number are scattered through the whole internal parenchymatous tissue, so that we cannot distinguish any pith at all. The bundles, moreover, have no cambium-layer, so that when once formed their development is complete, and there is no increase in thickness.

Stems, which may be simple or branched, are either aerial or subterranean. Aerial forms are, (1) erect, as the trunks of trees, or the more slender stems of most herbaceous plants, or the hollow culms of grasses. (2) Prostrate, as the creeping runners of the strawberry; or, (3) Climbing, in which case they may either twine round a support, like the hop; or hold on by means of prickles, like the bramble; or more usually by tendrils, as in the vine; or, finally, by root-fibres given off from the stem, as in the ivy. Examples of subterranean stems are, (1) the rhizome, a horizontal stem sending forth aerial shoots from its upper and roots from its lower surface; (2) the tuber, a much-swollen fleshy stem, like the potato, the eyes of which are buds; (3) the bulb, a very short undeveloped stem with crowded overlapping leaves, as the onion.

Branches proceed from buds which are formed in the autumn in the axils of the leaves, that is, at the point where the leaf or leaf-stalk is joined on to the stem; they remain dormant through the winter, and grow out into new shoots in the spring.

The leaf is borne on the stem; its tissues, epidermal, cortical, and vascular, are continuous with those of the stem; but it is distinguished by the fact that its growth is limited, it soon reaches the normal size and stops growing. The places where leaves come off from the stem are called nodes. There is great variety both in the position and form of leaves. Their position is said to be radical when they are all borne close together at the base of the stem, as in the dandelion; or cauline, when they are borne on the upper parts; in the latter case they may have a whorled arrangement, where several come off at the same level in a circle round the stem, as in the herb Paris; or opposite, where two stand on opposite sides at each node, as in the gentians; or alternate, where only one comes off at the same level. The study of leaf arrangement is known as phyllotaxy. A leaf may be stalked or sessile; if sessile, the blade is joined directly on to the stem. The stalk is known as the petiole, the flattened expanded blade as the lamina. The leaf may be simple or compound. A simple leaf cannot be divided without tearing the lamina; while a compound leaf is made up of independent leaflets, which may all come off from the same point as in the horse-chestnut, which is the digitate form; or may be arranged along a continuation of the petiole, as in the ash, which is the pinnate form of a compound leaf. The tissue of the lamina is traversed by vascular bundles, which are continuous through the petiole with those of the stem. The infinite variety of their ramifications is the cause of the often very characteristic venation of the leaves.

Leaves are said to be deciduous when they fall annually, as they do in the most common forest-trees; or persistent when they last longer, as in the firs, laurels, etc. Leaves of phanerogams are often very much modified or metamorphosed; thus the spines of the cactus are metamorphosed or modified leaves, as are also several forms of those curious leaf-growths known as pitchers, and many tendrils, such as those of the pea tribe. When we consider the flower we shall find that its various members are all more or less modified leaves.

In Dicotyledons and Gymnosperms the primary root or radicle after emerging from the seed continues to grow vigorously, often with copious lateral branching, forming an extensive root-system; but in Monocotyledons it soon perishes, and its place is taken by roots developed from the base of the stem, such roots are called adventitious.

Adventitious roots occur also in Dicotyledons, as in creeping stems like the strawberry, which bears buds at intervals from which new shoots are formed and roots given off. The clinging roots of the ivy are also adventitious. There are many forms of roots: some are large and woody, as those of trees; others fibrous, as in grasses; or they may be greatly swollen, forming the fleshy globose root of the turnip, or the conical one of the carrot. Such fleshy developments are due to the plant storing up a quantity of reserve food-material in the first year on which to draw in the second, when it will want to expend all its energy in flowering and fruiting. The potato, which is a swollen stem, answers the same purpose. The mistletoe and other parasites give off sucker-like roots which penetrate into the tissues of their host.

As to their reproduction, plants may be asexual, that is, not requiring the co-operation of two distinct (male and female) elements to produce a new individual; or sexual, when two such elements are necessary, and a process of fertilization takes place in which the female cell is impregnated by one or more male cells, and the cell resulting from the fusion of the two gives rise by very extensive growth and division to a new individual. In the very lowest plants, like Protococcus, only asexual reproduction is known, but in most Thallophytes both forms occur. In the asexual method numbers of small cells called spores are produced which on germination give rise to a plant similar to that which bore them. In the sexual process the contents of a male organ escape and impregnate the oosphere, or female cell contained in the female organ. The fertilized oosphere is termed an oospore, and by growth and division gives rise to a plant like that on which it was produced. In mosses and fern-like plants both sexual and asexual reproduction occur; but here the history of the life of the plant is divided into two stages, one in which it exists as an asexual individual, another in which it is sexual. In the fern, for instance, brown marks are seen on the back of some of the leaves, these are little cases containing spores; the fern as we know it is an asexual individual producing spores. The spores when set free germinate on a damp surface and produce not a new fern-plant, but a tiny green heart-shaped cellular expansion, called a prothallium, attached to the substratum by delicate root-hairs. Microscopical examination of its under surface reveals the sexual organs, a male organ producing motile male cells, which escape, pass into the female organ, and fertilize the oosphere, which then becomes the oospore. The oospore does not produce a new prothallium, but a fern-plant like the one with which we originally started. The cycle is thus complete.

The flower of a seed-plant is a shoot modified for purposes of reproduction. A buttercup, for instance, consists of a number of modified leaves borne in several whorls on the somewhat expanded top of the stalk, the receptacle or thalamus. Dissection of the flower shows (1) An outer whorl of five green leaves, very like ordinary foliage leaves; these are the sepals, and together make up the calyx. (2) An inner whorl of five yellow leaves, composing the corolla, each leaf being a petal. (3) More or less protected by the petals are a great number of stamens, each consisting of a slender stalk or filament capped by an anther, a little case containing the dry powdery pollen. The stamens are really much modified leaves collectively they form the andrcecium. (4) The rest of the receptacle right up to the apex is also covered by very much modified leaves, the carpels, forming the pistil or gynoecium. Each carpel consists of a basal portion, the ovary, in which is contained an ovule, and of a terminal beak-like portion, the style.

The androecium and gynoecium, being the parts directly concerned in reproduction, are distinguished, as the essential organs of the flower, from the calyx and corolla, which are only indirectly so concerned, though of great importance in the process. The ovule contained in the ovary is equivalent to the spore produced by the fern, but instead of escaping and producing an independent sexual individual it remains in the ovary, where processes go on within it corresponding to those resulting in the formation of the free and independent prothallium of the fern, and finally an oosphere is produced. Pollen from the stamen of the same or another plant has meanwhile been brought on to the special receptive portion of the style known as the stigma, where it protrudes a long tube which reaches right down through the style to the ovule. This tube represents the male element; it comes into close contact with the oosphere and fertilizes it. The oosphere then becomes an oospore, which by growth and division forms the embryo or new plant, while still included in the coats of the ovule. The ovule thus be comes the seed, which ultimately leaves the mother plant, bearing with it the embryo.

In the buttercup the members of each whorl of leaves composing the flower spring from the receptacle quite independently of each other, and of those of adjoining whorls. In many flowers, however, cohesion takes place between the similar members of a whorl; thus the petals frequently cohere to a greater or less distance from their base, and two great divisions of the Dicotyledons depend on this condition, namely, Polypetaloe, where the petals are free, as in the buttercup and poppy; and Gamopetaloe, with more or less coherent petals, as in the bluebell and primrose. Similarly the gynoecium, instead of being composed of free carpels as in the buttercup, the apocarpous condition, may be formed by the cohesion of several carpels into a one to several chambered compound ovary, as in the snapdragon, when it is said to be syncarpous. Adhesion also occurs between members of different whorls; thus the stamens are frequently inserted on the base of the petals, so that if we pull off a petal a stamen comes with it; and sometimes, as in orchids, the androecium and gynoecium are adherent. If the other floral whorls are inserted on the receptacle beneath the pistil they are said to be hypogynous and the pistil superior, as for instance in the poppy; if, on the other hand, as in the fuchsia, they spring from the top of the ovary, they are said to be epigynous and the pistil inferior.

An important characteristic is the fruit, which is the result of fertilization on the ovary. While the changes are going on by which the ovule becomes the seed the ovary also grows, often enormously, and forms the pericarp, which surrounds and protects the seed or seeds. The pericarp consists of an outer layer or epicarp, a middle layer or mesocarp, and an inner or endocarp. The outer usually forms the skin of the fruit; the two others may be succulent as in the berry, or the mesocarp only may be succulent and the endocarp hard and stony as in the plum. Besides the embryo the seed contains a store of food-material on which the young plant feeds during tlie first stages of its growth. This consists of albuminous, starchy, or fatty matter. In what are called albuminous seeds, as those of palms, the seed is chiefly composed of food-material in which is embedded a small embryo; the edible part of a cocoa-nut is the albuminous reserve material. In other seeds, like the bean, the fleshy cotyledons have already absorbed this food material into themselves, and the seedling draws on its own cotyledons for support; these seeds are known as exalbuminous.

It was stated above that the ovule might be fertilized by pollen from the same flower or from another plant; experiment has shown that the latter produces better results, both as regards quality and quantity of seed, and the vigour of the seedlings. That is, cross-fertilization is preferable to self-fertilization, and the various, often extremely curious, shapes of a flower and its parts are mainly for the purpose of ensuring the former and preventing the latter.

Many flowers contain both stamens and pistil, these are termed bisexual or hermaphrodite; while others contain stamens or pistil only, such are said to be unisexual. When both male and female flowers occur on the same plant the species is monoecious, like the hazel; while it is dioecious if the separate sexes are borne on different individuals, as is the case in the hop.

Plants which, like the sunflower, pass through all the stages from germination to production of fruit and seed in one season, and then perish, are called annuals; if two years are required, as with the turnip and onion, they are biennials; while perennials last several to many years, during which they may flower and seed many times.

A plant is built up chiefly of four elements: carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen, with small quantities of sulphur and phosphorus and some mineral matter. Substances containing these must therefore form the food. A green plant can take up its carbonaceous food in a very simple form by means of the green chlorophyll contained especially in its leaves. This absorbs some of the sun's rays, and by virtue of the energy represented by the light so absorbed it can obtain the carbon from the carbon dioxide gas present in the atmosphere. An animal, having no chlorophyll, has to use more complex carbon-containing compounds, in fact those which have already been worked up in the vegetable kingdom. The other items of the food are obtained from the water and mineral salts in the soil, the salts being brought into solution and absorbed with large quantities of water by the roots. The leaves are the laboratory where the food is worked up into the complex compounds which form the plant substance, and to raise the crude material from the absorbing roots to the leaves there is an upward current of liquid through the stem. This is known as the transpiration current; it travels in the wood-cells. A much larger quantity of water is absorbed than is required as food; this is got rid of by transpiration, that is, by the giving off of water-vapour from the leaves. This is evident if a plant be placed under a glass shade in the sunlight, the vapour given off becoming condensed on the glass. The complex compounds elaborated in the leaves are returned to all parts of the plant where growth, or storage of reserve-material, is taking place, by means of the other constituent of the vascular bundle, the bast tissue.

Fungi and a few seed-plants contain no chlorophyll and cannot therefore get their carbonaceous food from the carbon dioxide gas of the atmosphere, but have to live on decaying vegetable or animal matter, when they are termed saprophytes, like mushrooms, or on living plants or animals, when they are parasites; such are the fungi which cause diseases in these organisms. Plants, like animals, breathe; respiration goes on both day and night, and is represented by the absorption of oxygen from, and the return of carbon dioxide gas to the atmosphere. If we prevent a plant from breathing, that is keep it in an atmosphere containing no free oxygen, it will sooner or later die.

In botany, as in zoology, individuals which closely resemble each other form collectively a species. Where existing differences are considered too minute to constitute difference of species the set of individuals in which they occur ranks as a variety of the species. Species which, though having each some distinctive peculiarity, yet on the whole resemble each other, constitute a genus. Assemblages of genera agreeing in certain marked characters form families or natural orders. The names of the orders are generally formed on the type of Rosaceae, the rose order, Ulmaceae, the elm order, etc. Classes, such as Monocotyledons and Dicotyledons, contain a large number of natural orders. The older systems of classification were based largely on the uses of plants, for they were studied simply from a medicinal or generally economic point of view.

In 1682, however, John Ray discovered the difference between Monocotyledons and Dicotyledons, and published an arrangement of plants founded on their structural forms, especially on the characters afforded by the seed; this formed the basis of the natural system of classification, one, that is, which brings together those genera and families which a careful comparative study of the whole structure and development shows to be most nearly related.

Linnaeus did not recognize John Ray's great primary divisions, and his system from 1735 is a purely artificial one, since it only takes account of a few marked characters afforded by one or two sets of organs, and does not propose to unite plants by their natural affinities. He divides Phanerogams into twenty-three classes, chiefly according to the number and character of the stamens; each class is subdivided into orders based on the number and character of the styles. Owing to the exclusive part played by the sexual organs this arrangement is known as the sexual system.

The great value of Linnaeus's work was his careful scientific revision and adjustment of all the known genera, and his introduction of the binomial system of nomenclature, in which every species has a double name, that of the genus to which it belongs coming first, then that of the species; thus Bellis perennis L. is the daisy, and the name shows that the species perennis of the genus Bellis is the plant in question. The L. which follows indicates that we mean the plant so named by Linnceus. The sexual system is now only of historic interest. By the sagacity of the Jussieus the genera of Linnaeus were more or less naturally grouped under John Ray's primary divisions; and by the subsequent labours of De Candolle, Robert Brown, Lindley, and many others we have attained to a fairly natural system.
Research Botany

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