egetable life without reference to its use to men or animals,
we should rightly say that the essence of it was in leaf and flower--not in
trunk or fruit; yet for the sake of animals, we find that some plants, like
the vine, are apparently meant chiefly to produce fruit; others, like
laurels, chiefly to produce leaves; others chiefly to produce flowers; and
others to produce permanently serviceable and sculptural wood; or, in some
cases, merely picturesque and monumental masses of vegetable rock,
"intertwisted {141} fibres serpentine,"--of far nobler and more pathetic
use in their places, and their enduring age, than ever they could be for
material purpose in human habitation. For this central mass of the
vegetable organism, then, the English word 'trunk' and French 'tronc' are
always in accurate scholarship to be retained--meaning the part of a tree
which remains when its branches are lopped away.

17. We have now got distinct ideas of four different kinds of stem, and
simple names for them in Latin and English,--Petiolus, Cymba, Stemma, and
Truncus; Stalk, Leaf-stalk, Stem, and Trunk; and these are all that we
shall commonly need. There is, however, one more that will be sometimes
necessary, though it is ugly and difficult to pronounce, and must be as
little used as we can.

And here I must ask you to learn with me a little piece of Roman history. I
say, to _learn_ with me, because I don't know any Roman history except the
two first books of Livy, and little bits here and there of the following
six or seven. I only just know enough about it to be able to make out the
bearings and meaning of any fact that I now learn. The greater number of
modern historians know, (if honest enough even for that,) the facts, or
something that may possibly be like the facts, but haven't the least notion
of the meaning of them. So that, though I have to find out everything that
I want in Smith's dictionary, like any schoolboy, I can usually tell you
the {142} significance of what I so find, better than perhaps even Mr.
Smith himself could.

18. In the 586th page of Mr. Smith's volume, you have it written that
'Calvus,' bald-head, was the name of a family of the Licinia gens; that the
man of whom we hear earliest, as so named, was the first plebeian elected
to military tribuneship in B.C. 400; and that the fourth of whom we hear,
was surnamed 'Stolo,' because he was so particular in pruning away the
Stolons (stolones), or useless young sho