Having got himself into this piece of lovely confusion, he proceeds to give a figure of the wood in the second year, which I think he has borrowed, without acknowledgment, from Figuier, omitting a piece of Figuier’s woodcut which is unexplained in Figuier’s text.  I will spare my readers the work I have had to do, in order to get the statements on either side clarified:  but I think they will find, if they care to work through the wilderness of the two authors’ wits, that this which follows is the sum of what they have effectively to tell us; with the collated list of the main questions they leave unanswered—­and, worse, unasked.

18.  An ordinary tree branch, in transverse section, consists essentially of three parts only,—­the Pith, Wood, and Bark.

The pith is in full animation during the first year—­that is to say, during the actual shooting of the wood.  We are left to infer that in the second year, the pith of the then unprogressive shoot becomes collective only, not formative; and that the pith of the new shoot virtually energizes the new wood in its deposition beside the old one.  Thus, let a b, Figure 26, be a shoot of the first year, and b c of the second.  The pith remains of the same thickness in both, but that of the new shoot is, I suppose, chiefly active in sending down the new wood to thicken the old one, which is collected, however, and fastened by the extending pith-rays below.  You see, I have given each shoot four fibres of wood for its own; then the four fibres of the upper one send out two to thicken the lower:  the pith-rays, represented by the white transverse claws, catch and gather all together.  Mind, I certify nothing of this to you; but if this do not happen,—­let the botanists tell you what does.

19.  Secondly.  The wood, represented by these four lines, is to be always remembered as consisting of fibres and vessels; therefore it is called ‘vascular,’ a word which you may as well remember (though rarely needed in familiar English), with its roots, vas, a vase, and vasculum, a little vase or phial.  ‘Vascule’ may sometimes be allowed in botanical descriptions where ‘cell’ is not clear enough; thus, at present, we find our botanists calling the pith ‘cellular’ but the wood ‘vascular,’ with, I think, the implied meaning that a ‘vascule,’ little or large, is a long thing, and has some liquid in it, while a ‘cell’ is a more or less round thing, and to be supposed empty, unless described as full.  But what liquid fills the vascules of the wood, they do not tell us.[44] I assume that they absorb water, as long as the tree lives.

[Illustration:  FIG. 27.]