[Illustration: Fig. 63. Bud of the Horse Chestnut, showing the overlapping of the scales.] If you cut right through the length of a bud with a sharp knife, you will see how all these scales and young leaves are packed together, as in fig. 64. [Illustration: Fig. 64. Bud cut through lengthways, showing the bud-scales and young leaves packed within them.] Take another bud and carefully pull off all the scales one by one and lay them in a row, beginning with those right outside; you will see that they get less scale-like and more like real leaves as you go in towards the centre of the bud (~see~ fig. 65). The outside simple brown scales scarcely look like leaves at all, but the inner ones are green and soft, and in some plants, those right inside have quite a leaf-like appearance. [Illustration: Fig. 65. A series of bud scales from a Horse Chestnut; (~a~) and (~b~) are entirely hard and brown; (~c~) and (~d~) are brown at the tips and green at the base, where the others cover them; (~e~) is quite green, soft, and leaf-like.] This helps us to see that ~bud scales are really only modified leaves, which are altered for their special work of protection~ of the young leaves through the winter. Of course, you know that the buds are already on the trees in the late autumn after the leaves have fallen; but have you seen the buds already there in the summer while the leaves are still fresh and green? If you look for buds you will be sure to find them, and at the same time you will learn where they grow on the stem. You must look right at the base of the leaf stalk, in the angle made by the leaf stalk where it joins the main stem; this is called the ~axil~ of the leaf, and it is in the axil of the leaf that you will find the small green buds in summer-time. These buds grow out in the following year, so that a new leaf comes in very nearly the same place as the old one, or, what is more usual, there grows out a new branch which may bear several new leaves. Now examine a twig of horse chestnut or sycamore from which the leaves have dropped; notice that, where the ~buds~ are to be seen on the stem, they ~lie immediately above scars~ of a definite shape, ~which are the scars left by the fallen leaf stalks~, as you can see by comparing them in the autumn with leaf stalks which are just falling away (~see~ fig. 66, ~l~, ~b~, and ~s~).