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Nothing could be more useful than botany-those who could not distinguish between a dicotyledon and a monocotyledon could certainly never rightly grasp the nature of a hedgerow. Bellis perennis and Sinapis arvensis were not to be confounded, and Triticum repens was a sure sign of a bad farmer.
If it had been only the hard words that floored them such as "cotyledon" and "dicotyledon" I should not have been surprised; but they blundered over the ordinary English, and had next to no sense of the meaning of punctuation.
Is this not absurd, when the same child can come home from school and talk glibly of a parallelepipedon, a rhombus, rhomboid, polyhedral angle, archipelago, law of primogeniture, the binomial theorem, and of a dicotyledon! He also learns French, German, Latin, Greek, and the argot of the public school! The theological leader of to-day cannot be a creed-monger: he must be a creed-maker.
From the side of Darwin's theory, on the contrary, this fact acquires meaning and significance, and it appears in return to be fitted to throw light upon a question in which Bronn saw "the first and most material objection against the new theory," namely, how it is possible that from the accumulation in various directions of the smallest variations running out of one another, varieties and species are produced, which stand out from the primary form clearly and sharply like the petiolated leaf of a Dicotyledon, and are not amalgamated with the primary form and with each other like the irregular curled lobes of a foliaceous Lichen.
Compare these parts with the Morning-Glory, Sunflower, Bean, and Pea. Where is the food stored? How many cotyledons have Corn, Wheat, and Oats? How many have Bean, Pea, Morning-Glory, and Sunflower? Compare the veins of the leaves of each class and see what difference you can find. This will bring up the terms dicotyledon and monocotyledon. Di means two, mono means one.
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