DISTINCTIONS OF CLASSES. 213 



attention should then be paid to others, for the pur- 

 pose of ascertaining, whether, although a plant 

 may appear in some one point of structure not to 

 be Dicotyledonous, it may not upon the whole 

 possess the characters of that great division. For 

 instance, the common garden Pink, has leaves which 

 are not netted ; you might suppose on that account 

 that it is not Dicotyledonous ; but when you find 

 that it is a branching plant, with five divisions of the 

 calyx, five petals, and ten stamens, you may be sure 

 that it is Dicotyledonous, notwithstanding the ap- 

 parent deviation of the leaves from the general rule 

 of structure. 



All this will be more clear to you, when you be- 

 come acquainted practically with monocotyledonous 

 plants ; which are quite different things. They often 

 shoot up into the air without any branches, and con- 

 sequently have a sharp-headed appearance when 

 they form trees ; there is only one seed-lobe to their 

 embryo ; and their stem has no trace, whatever, of 

 concentric circles ; on the contrary, it presents^ when 

 cut across, one uniform dotted surface, as you may 

 see if you take a piece of the common cane, which is 

 split for the bottoms of chairs, and which is in reality 

 the stem of a sort of Palm. Instead of enlarging 

 their stems by the addition of new wood to the out- 

 side of the old, Monocotyledonous plants only add 

 new matter to the centre of that which previously 

 existed, on which account they are named endo- 

 genous (or growers inwardly). The veins of their 

 leaves run in nearly parallel lines from the base to 



