tages over that
more commonly in use,"[19] into merenchyma, conenchyma, ovenchyma,
atractenchyma, cylindrenchyma, colpenchyma, cladenchyma, and prismenchyma.

20. Take your laurel branch into your hand again. There are, as you must
well know, innumerable shapes and orders of leaves;--there are some like
claws; some like fingers, and some like feet; there are endlessly cleft
ones, and endlessly clustered ones, and inscrutable divisions within
divisions of the fretted verdure; and wrinkles, and ripples, and
stitchings, and hemmings, and pinchings, and gatherings, and crumplings,
and clippings, and what not. But there is nothing so constantly noble as
the pure leaf of the laurel, bay, orange, and olive; numerable, sequent,
perfect in setting, divinely simple and serene. I shall call these noble
leaves 'Apolline' leaves. They characterize many orders of plants, great
and small,--from the magnolia to the myrtle, and exquisite 'myrtille' {52}
of the hills, (bilberry); but wherever you find them, strong, lustrous,
dark green, simply formed, richly scented or stored,--you have nearly
always kindly and lovely vegetation, in healthy ground and air.

21. The gradual diminution in rank beneath the Apolline leaf, takes place
in others by the loss of one or more of the qualities above named. The
Apolline leaf, I said, is strong, lustrous, full in its green, rich in
substance, simple in form. The inferior leaves are those which have lost
strength, and become thin, like paper; which have lost lustre, and become
dead by roughness of surface, like the nettle,--(an Apolline leaf may
become dead by _bloom_, like the olive, yet not lose beauty); which have
lost colour and become feeble in green, as in the poplar, or _crudely_
bright, like rice; which have lost substance and softness, and have nothing
to give in scent or nourishment; or become flinty or spiny; finally, which
have lost simplicity, and become cloven or jagged. Many of these losses are
partly atoned for by gain of some peculiar loveliness. Grass and moss, and
parsley and fern, have each their own delightfulness; yet they are all of
inferior power and honour, compared to the Apolline leaves.

[Illustration: FIG. 3.]

22. You see, however, that though your laurel leaf has a central stem, and
traces of ribs branching from it, in a vertebrated manner, they are so
faint that we cannot take it for a type of vertebrate structure. But the
two figures of elm and alisma leaf, given in