128 Field, Forest, and Wayside Flowers 



vessels. Transverse partition-walls separate one 

 vessel from another, and these walls are sometimes 

 horizontal and sometimes aslant. An inquiry into 

 the names and uses of all these vessels would take 

 one far into the mazes of structural botany. 



The student afield, with no equipment save a 

 penknife and a pocket-lens, and with mayhap but a 

 limited stock of patience, is content to know that this 

 woody thread is a fibre-vascular bundle, and that 

 its important parts are wood-vessels, bast-tubes, and 

 tough fibres, which give strength and support to the 

 whole affair. Further support is given to the fibro- 

 vascular bundle of a monocotyledon or a fern by a 

 bundle-sheath made of corky cells or of cells with 

 very thick walls. 



The kin of the rose, too, form fibre-vascular 

 bundles, and tough ones at that. When, in rid- 

 ding the lawn of an intrusive plantain, one gives a 

 pull to the tuft of leaves they are apt to tear away, 

 leaving whitish strings dangling from the broken 

 surfaces. These are the fibro-vascular bundles of 

 the leaf-stem, and so are the strings, which must 

 be removed from imperfectly-frosted table-celery. 



In the "wood" of a bundle are included all 

 those vessels through which fluids ascend from the 

 roots toward the leaves. 



