by Louis Figuier.  I should like those of my readers who can afford it to buy both these books; the first named, at any rate, as I shall always refer to it for structural drawings, and on points of doubtful classification; while the second contains much general knowledge, expressed with some really human intelligence and feeling; besides some good and singularly just history of botanical discovery and the men who guided it.  The botanists, indeed, tell me proudly, “Figuier is no authority.”  But who wants authority!  Is there nothing known yet about plants, then, which can be taught to a boy or girl, without referring them to an ‘authority’?

I, for my own part, care only to gather what Figuier can teach concerning things visible, to any boy or girl, who live within reach of a bramble hedge, or a hawthorn thicket, and can find authority enough for what they are told, in the sticks of them.

2.  If only he would, or could, tell us clearly that much; but like other doctors, though with better meaning than most, he has learned mainly to look at things with a microscope,—­rarely with his eyes.  And I am sorry to see, on re-reading this chapter of my own, which is little more than an endeavour to analyze and arrange the statements contained in his second, that I have done it more petulantly and unkindly than I ought; but I can’t do all the work over again, now,—­more’s the pity.  I have not looked at this chapter for a year, and shall be sixty before I know where I am;—­(I find myself, instead, now, sixty-four!)

3.  But I stand at once partly corrected in this second chapter of Figuier’s, on the ‘Tige,’ French from the Latin ‘Tignum,’ which ‘authorities’ say is again from the Sanscrit, and means ’the thing hewn with an axe’; anyhow it is modern French for what we are to call the stem (Sec. 12, p. 136).

“The tige,” then, begins M. Louis, “is the axis of the ascending system of a vegetable, and it is garnished at intervals with vital knots, (eyes,) from which spring leaves and buds, disposed in a perfectly regular order.  The root presents nothing of the kind.  This character permits us always to distinguish, in the vegetable axis, what belongs really to the stem, and what to the root.”

4.  Yes; and that is partly a new idea to me, for in this power of assigning their order for the leaves, the stem seems to take a royal or commandant character, and cannot be merely defined as the connexion of the leaf with the roots.

In it is put the spirit of determination.  One cannot fancy the little leaf, as it is born, determining the point it will be born at:  the governing stem must determine that for it.  Also the disorderliness of the root is to be noted for a condition of its degradation, no less than its love, and need, of Darkness.

Nor was I quite right (above, Sec. 15, p. 139) in calling the stem itself ‘spiral’:  it is itself a straight-growing rod, but one which, as it grows, lays the buds of future leaves round it in a spiral order, like the bas-relief on Trajan’s column.