CHAPTER VIII 
THE PARTS OF A SEED-PLANT 
91. Flax asatype. De Candolle, one of the most learned 
of French botanists, was wont to say that he could teach 
all he knew of botany from a handful of plants. What he 
had in mind was doubtless the great truth that among the 
resemblances of plants to one another there are some of such 
fundamental importance that it becomes possible to discern 
amid the endless variety of forms a few plans of structure 
upon which all plants are built. His handful of specimens 
would have been so chosen that each might exhibit especially 
well the features common to many kinds, and thus serve at 
once as a convenient standard of comparison and as a means 
of teaching truths of very wide application. A form which 
in this way is representative or typical of any group, natural- 
ists call a type. 
Flax (Figs. 217 I, II) will serve well as our type of phen- 
ogams or seed-plants because it possesses all the parts which 
they commonly show, and exhibits them in comparatively 
unmodified condition. Like all true flowering plants it pro- 
duces seeds. 
92. The seed may be compared roughly to an egg. Much 
as in a hen’s egg, for example, we have the shell covering a 
mass of food material provided for the chick or germ which 
lies within it, so in the seed (Fig. 279A) we find a protective 
seed-coat (c) enclosing seed-food (f) and a germ or embryo ' (e). 
Much of the food provided for the flax embryo is already 
stored within the little plant itself; what remains to be ab- 
sorbed has been likened to the white of egg and is called the 
albumen ? of the seed. The embryo within the seed is found 
1 Em/bry-o < Gr. embryon, germ. 
2 Al-bu’/men < L. albus, white. 
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