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CHAPTER III.
OF THE CUTICLE OR EPIDERMIS.
Every part of a living plant is covered with a skin or membrane called the cuticle, which same denomination has been given by anatomists to the scarf skin that covers the animal body, protecting it from the injuries of the air, and allowing of due absorption and perspiration through its pores.
There is the most striking analogy between the animal and the vegetable cuticle. In the former, it varies in thickness from the exquisitely delicate film which covers the eye, to the hard skin of the hand or foot, or the far coarser covering of a Tortoise or Rhinoceros; in the latter it is equally delicate on the parts of a flower, and scarcely less hard on the leaves of the Pearly Aloe, or coarse on the trunk of a Plane tree. In the numerous layers
