124 PROSERPINA. 



ity." 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 i authority ' ? 



1. 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 state- 

 ments 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 be- 

 fore 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 i 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 French for what we are to call the 

 stem ( 12, p. 136). 



" The tige," then, begins M. Louis, " is the axis of the 

 ascending system of a vegetable, and it is garnished at 



