r has been written six years. It was delayed in
order to complete the promised clearer analysis of stem-structure;
which, after a great deal of chopping, chipping, and peeling of my oaks
and birches, came to reverently hopeless pause. What is here done may
yet have some use in pointing out to younger students how they may
simplify their language, and direct their thoughts, so as to attain, in
due time, to reverent hope.]

1. The most generally useful book, to myself, hitherto, in such little time
as I have for reading about plants, has been Lindley's 'Ladies' Botany';
but the most rich and true I have yet found in illustration, the 'Histoire
des Plantes,'[35] 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 Fr