That is true: some are creeping, or fibrous, or bulbous, or knobbed, or taprooted. Can you give me instances of each?
Let me see. The mint spreads underground by its creeping roots. The potatoe is knobbed, and the onion and tulip are bulbous. The grass is fibrous, and the parsnip has a tap root.”
So much for the root. Now let us look at the bark. I suppose you have noticed the difference of the bark of our forest trees.
I know that they shed their bark, though not in the same way. The stringy bark peels off in strings. The gum throws out fine long ribands, waving in the wind. The iron bark sheds its thick coat in great lumps.
But does the whole of the bark thus fall off?
Oh, no: it is only the rough, worn-out stuff. There is always bark left. It puts me in mind of my hand, that got so horny after sawing a whole day at a big tree; for days after the rough skin got peeling off as if it was not wanted.
Then you have more skins than one. You are just like a tree, for that has several coats to its bark. Which is the softer, the outer or inner bark?
The outer is hard, and the inner soft. But there is a fresh gum tree just cut down: that will show us the barks.—Yes, now I peel off the outside, there is a very soft, juicy stuff, a thing I feel—a soft coat of bark close to the ring of white-looking wood.
Mind, Willie, the outside is the cuticle or epidermis, having pores or openings through which moisture issues at one time, and is absorbed at another. These Stomates or openings are very small; in our Bush Pigfaces, that the Blacks eat, there are 70,000 Stomates to every square inch of skin.