214 LETTER XVIII. 



the point of the blade, without branching, or forming 

 a kind of net work, as in the leaves of grasses or 

 lilies ; so that in this respect they are immediately 

 known from Dicotyledonous plants. Their flowers, 

 moreover, are almost always divided by three, instead 

 of by four or five ; you will, for instance, generally find 

 three sepals, and three petals, and three, or twice 

 three stamens, and an ovary made up of three car- 

 pels; so that there are abundant means of dis- 

 tinguishing Monocotyledonous plants, whether you 

 have only their stem, or their leaves, or their 

 flowers, or even their fruit to examine. Now just 

 observe, how important this is ; suppose you saw a 

 simple-veined leaf of some plant, and nothing further ; 

 although you might not be able to tell the name of 

 the plant which bore the leaf, nor even its natural 

 order, yet you would know that its stem must have 

 grown by addition to its inside, that its embryo had 

 only one seed-lobe, and that its flowers would in all 

 probability be divided into three sepals, and three 

 petals. Nor is this all ; nearly the whole of Monoco- 

 tyledonous plants are harmless ; the chances would 

 therefore be, that your leaf belonged to some harm- 

 less plant ; and if it were the leaf of a tree, you 

 would be perfectly certain that it came from some 

 hot climate ; for no Monocotyledonous trees are found 

 in cold countries. The inspection of a mere leaf 

 would therefore lead you to a number of useful and 

 interesting conclusions, at which you could never 

 arrive if you studied Botany according to an artificial 

 svstem. 



