into the form C; and then, pulling up the corners c d, stitch them together with a loose thread so that the points c and d shall be within half an inch of each other; and you will have a kind of triangular scoop, or shovel, with a stem, by which you can sufficiently hold it, D.
7. And from this easily constructed and tenable model, you may learn at once these following main facts about all leaves.
[I.] That they are not flat, but, however slightly, always hollowed into craters, or raised into hills, in one or another direction; so that any drawable outline of them does not in the least represent the real extent of their surfaces; and until you know how to draw a cup, or a mountain, rightly, you have no chance of drawing a leaf. My simple artist readers of long ago, when I told them to draw leaves, thought they could do them by the boughfull, whenever they liked. Alas, except by old William Hunt, and Burne Jones, I've not seen a leaf painted, since those burdocks of Turner's; far less sculptured—though one would think at first that was easier! Of which we shall have talk elsewhere; here I must go on to note fact number two, concerning leaves.
8. [II.] The strength of their supporting stem consists not merely in the gathering together of all the fibres, but in gathering them essentially into the profile of the letter V, which you will see your doubled paper stem has; and of which you can feel the strength and use, in your hand, as you hold it. Gather a common plantain leaf, and look at the way it puts its round ribs together at the base, and you will understand the matter at once. The arrangement is modified and disguised in every possible way, according to the leaf's need: in the aspen, the leaf-stalk becomes an absolute vertical plank; and in the large trees is often almost rounded into the likeness of a fruit-stalk;—but, in all,[[36]] the essential structure is this doubled one; and in all, it opens at the place where the leaf joins the main stem, into a kind of cup, which holds next year's bud in the hollow of it.
9. Now there would be no inconvenience in your simply getting into the habit of calling the round petiol of the fruit the 'stalk,' and the contracted channel of the leaf, 'leaf-stalk.' But this way of naming them would not enforce, nor fasten in your mind, the difference between the two, so well as if you have an entirely different name for the leaf-stalk. Which is the more desirable, because the limiting character of the leaf, botanically, is—(I only learned this from my botanical friend the other day, just
in the very moment I wanted it,)—that it holds the bud of the new stem in its own hollow, but cannot itself grow in the hollow of anything else;—or, in botanical language, leaves are never axillary,—don't grow in armpits, but are themselves armpits; hollows, that is to say, where they spring from the main stem.
10. Now there is already a received and useful botanical word, 'cyme' (which we shall want in a little while.) derived from the Greek κῦμα, a swelling or rising wave, and used to express a swelling cluster of foamy blossom. Connected with that word, but in a sort the reverse of it, you have the Greek 'κύμβη,' the hollow of a cup, or bowl; whence κύμβαλου, a cymbal,—that is to say, a musical instrument owing its tone to its hollowness. These words become in Latin, cymba, and cymbalum; and I think you will find it entirely convenient and advantageous to call the leaf-stalk distinctively the 'cymba,' retaining the mingled idea of cup and boat, with respect at least to the part of it that holds the bud; and understanding that it gathers itself into a V-shaped, or even narrowly vertical, section, as a boat narrows to its bow, for strength to sustain the leaf.
With this word you may learn the Virgilian line, that shows the final use of iron—or iron-darkened—ships: