§ 3. This is an interesting question: one, also, which, I fear, we must solve, so far as yet it can be solved, with little help. Perhaps nothing is more curious in the history of human mind than the way in which the science of botany has become oppressed by nomenclature. Here is perhaps the first question which an intelligent child would think of asking about a tree: "Mamma, how does it make its trunk?" and you may open one botanical work after another, and good ones too, and by sensible men,--you shall not find this child's question fairly put, much less fairly answered. You will be told gravely that a stem has received many names, such as _culmus_, _stipes_, and _truncus_; that twigs were once called _flagella_, but are now called _ramuli_; and that Mr. Link calls a straight stem, with branches on its sides, a _caulis excurrens_; and a stem, which at a certain distance above the earth breaks out into irregular ramifications, a _caulis deliquescens_. All thanks and honor be to Mr. Link! But at this moment, when we want to know _why_ one stem breaks "at a certain distance," and the other not at all, we find no great help in those splendid excurrencies and deliquescencies. "At a certain distance?" Yes: but why not before? or why then? How was it that, for many and many a year, the young shoots agreed to construct a vertical tower, or, at least, the nucleus of one, and then, one merry day, changed their minds, and built about their metropolis in all directions, nobody knows where, far into the air in free delight? How is it that yonder larch-stem grows straight and true, while all its branches, constructed by the same process as the mother trunk, and under the mother trunk's careful inspection and direction, nevertheless have lost all their manners, and go forking and flashing about, more like cracklings of spitefullest lightning than decent branches of trees that dip green leaves in dew? § 4. We have probably, many of us, missed the point of such questions as these, because we too readily associated the structure of trees with that of flowers. The flowering part of a plant shoots out or up, in some given direction, until, at a stated period, it opens or branches into perfect form by a law just as fixed, and just as inexplicable, as that which numbers the joints of an animal's skeleton, and puts the head on its right joint. In many forms of flowers--foxglove, aloe, hemlock, or blossom of maize--the structure of the flowering part so far assimilates itself to that of a tree, that we not unnaturally think of a tree only as a large flower, or large remnant of flower, run to seed. And we suppose the time and place of its branching to be just as organically determined as the height of the stalk of straw, or hemlock pipe, and the fashion of its branching just as fixed as the shape of petals in a pansy or cowslip.