126 Field, Forest, and Wayside Flowers 
bases and perfectly straight veins are characteristic 
of the narrow foliage of monocotyledenous plants. 
Whether narrow or broad, the leaves borne by 
the lily’s kin have, as a rule, straight edges, plain 
and unadorned. 
The leaves of the rose’s kin are far more elabo- 
rate in effect. Sometimes, as in the case of the 
rose itself, each of them is ‘‘ compound’’—made up 
of a number of smaller leaves. Sometimes they 
are cut into delicate lace-work, as is the foliage 
of the yarrow and of the domestic carrot. 
Sometimes, like the leaves of the rose-geranium, 
they are curiously slashed, and in many cases their 
edges are daintily cut into points, teeth, or scallops. 
Their veins, as we have already observed, run 
‘‘every-which way,’ and even when the larger 
veins parallel one another with copy-book preci- 
sion, as in the chestnut-leaves, the veinlets wander 
here and there in graceful lawlessness. 
It is in the tissue of the stem, and in its mode of 
growth, that the chief distinction between the two 
greatest groups of flowering-plants is to be found. 
Next to the palmettos, which are not found in a 
wild state north of the Carolinas, the Indian corn is 
the largest of native monocotyledonous plants. If 
we cut a thin, cross-wise slice out of a corn-stalk 
