75.  The beans are, from earliest time, the most important and interesting of the seeds of the great tribe of plants from which came the Latin and French name for all kitchen vegetables,—­things that are gathered with the hand—­podded seeds that cannot be reaped, or beaten, or shaken down, but must be gathered green.  “Leguminous” plants, all of them having flowers like butterflies, seeds in (frequently pendent) pods, —­“laetum siliqua quassante legumen”—­smooth and tender leaves, divided into many minor ones; strange adjuncts of tendril, for climbing (and sometimes of thorn); exquisitely sweet, yet pure scents of blossom, and almost always harmless, if not serviceable seeds.  It is of all tribes of plants the most definite, its blossoms being entirely limited in their parts, and not passing into other forms.  It is also the most usefully extended in range and scale; familiar in the height of the forest—­ acacia, laburnum, Judas-tree; familiar in the sown field—­bean and vetch and pea; familiar in the pasture—­in every form of clustered clover and sweet trefoil tracery; the most entirely serviceable and human of all orders of plants.

76.  Next, in the potato, we have the scarcely innocent underground stem of one of a tribe set aside for evil; having the deadly nightshade for its queen, and including the henbane, the witch’s mandrake, and the worst natural curse of modern civilization—­tobacco.* And the strange thing about this tribe is, that though thus set aside for evil, they are not a group distinctly separate from those that are happier in function.  There is nothing in other tribes of plants like the form of the bean blossom; but there is another family of forms and structure closely connected with this venomous one.  Examine the purple and yellow bloom of the common hedge nightshade; you will find it constructed exactly like some of the forms of the cyclamen; and, getting this clue, you will find at last the whole poisonous and terrible group to be—­sisters of the primulas!

* It is not easy to estimate the demoralizing effect on the youth of Europe of the cigar, in enabling them to pass their time happily in idleness.

The nightshades are, in fact, primroses with a curse upon them; and a sign set in their petals, by which the deadly and condemned flowers may always be known from the innocent ones,—­that the stamens of the nightshades are between the lobes, and of the primulas, opposite the lobes, of the corolla.

77.  Next, side by side, in the celery and radish, you have the two great groups of unbelled and cruciferous plants; alike in conditions of rank among herbs:  both flowering in clusters; but the unbelled group, flat, the crucifers, in spires:  both of them mean and poor in the blossom, and losing what beauty they have by too close crowding; both of them having the most curious influence on human character in the temperate zones of the earth, from the days of the parsley crown, and hemlock drink, and mocked Euripidean