WAYSIDE WEEDS, 135 



what people call the huskj but a botanist the in- 

 volucre. The oak, too, has its barren and deciduous,. 

 or quickly-falhng stameniferous catkins, but its 

 fertile flowers are solitary within a cup-shaped 

 scale, or rather aggregation of scales, which at 

 length become the " acorn cups" of fairy lore. 



Lastly, we have mentioned the fir. It, too, has 

 its barren catkins, but the fruit, as all know, is in 

 the fir cone, which generally we see when it has 

 dropped seedless and dry from the tree ; the ovules, 

 the seeds, which lay naked at the base of the scales 

 ia the dry cone, having disappeared, wings and all. 

 The naked' seeds of the firs or pines, that is, seeds 

 without proper pistils, and their many cotyledonary, 

 or seed-leaves, in contradistinction to the two seed- 

 leaves of the plants hitherto examined, place this 

 pine tribe by themselves, even were there not other 

 distinctive characters iu leaf, wood, etc. ; but these 

 are not for our beginners to enter into. 



With the simple, incomplete flowers of our wood- 

 land trees, we come to an end of the first great 

 division of the vegetable kingdom, that which in- 

 cludes plants with two seed-lobes, or seed-leaves, or 

 cotyledons, hence named the dicotyledons, and which, 

 having netted veined leaves, also grow by the de- 

 posit of annual rings of wood on the outer circle of 

 their stems, beneath the bark, and hence are fre- 

 quently called exogens, or exogenous plants. . After 

 our next lesson on , stems a,nd roots, we reach the 



