BULLETIN 
TORREY BOTANICAL CLUB. 
Antidromy of Plants.* 
By GEORGE MACLOSKIE, 
During the summer of 1893 I made observations on Indian 
corn, which were published in abstract in the Princeton College 
Bulletin of November, 1893. It was then shown that, if we judge 
from the modes of overlapping of the leaf margins of Maize and 
of other Gramineae, there must be two kinds of plants of every 
species of the order; the one kind or “caste” has its lowest foliage 
leaf (the leaf next above the pileolus in the embryo) with the 
right margin of its sheath overlapping the left margin, “ dextrally 
infolded” as I term it; and the other caste has the left margin 
Overlapping the right, “ sinistrally infolded.” The leaves at sub- 
sequent nodes are alternately sinistral and dextral. In order to 
aScertain the origin of this duplicity I read Van Tieghem’s re- 
_ Searches on the Cotyledons of the Gramineae (Ann. des Sci. 
re Naturelles, 1872), which stated that the leaves of the plumule 
within the seed are alternately enfolded on each other, but failed 
_ to indicate the direction of the enfolding of the first leaf The 
_ dissection of one or two seeds revealed a dextral initial folding; 
, end soon other grains were found with sinistral folding. Thus 
it became manifest that as there are two castes of maize-plant, so 
“* 3 —.. 
* Read before Section G., A. A. A. S., Springfield meeting, September, 1895. 
+ He states that the direction of the evolution of the leaves is determinate, but 
_ there is variation as to the first green leaf, and he had not been able to discover its 
Cause, 
