find myself, instead, now, sixty-four!)

3. But I stand at once partly corrected in this second chapter of
Figuier's, on the 'Tige,' French from the Latin 'Tignum,' which
'authorities' say is again from the Sanscrit, and means 'the thing hewn
with an axe'; anyhow it is modern French for what we are to call the stem
(§ 12, p. 136).

"The tige," then, begins M. Louis, "is the axis of the ascending system of
a vegetable, and it is garnished at intervals with vital knots, (eyes,)
from which spring leaves and buds, disposed in a perfectly regular order.
The root presents nothing of the kind. This character permits us always to
distinguish, in the vegetable axis, what belongs really to the stem, and
what to the root."

4. Yes; and that is partly a new idea to me, for in this power of
_assigning their order_ for the leaves, the stem seems to take a royal or
commandant character, and cannot be merely defined as the connexion of the
leaf with the roots.

In _it_ is put the spirit of determination. One cannot fancy the little
leaf, as it is born, determining the point it will be born at: the
governing stem must determine that for it. Also the disorderliness of the
root is to be noted for a condition of its degradation, no less than its
love, and need, of Darkness.

Nor was I quite right (above, § 15, p. 139) in calling the stem _itself_
'spiral': it is itself a straight-growing rod, but one which, as it grows,
lays the buds of future leaves round it in a spiral order, like the
bas-relief on Trajan's column.