ITS METAMORPHY. 



173 



312. Another line of teratological evidence is furnished by 

 prolification. The parts of the flower are, by the doctrine, 

 homologous with leaves, and no leaf ever terminates an axis. 



Normally, in fact, the 

 axis is never prolonged 

 beyond the flower, but 

 abnormally it ma}' be 1 . 

 It may resume vegeta- 

 tive growth as a termi- 

 nal growing bud, either 

 from between the pistils 

 after the whole flower is 

 formed, or at an earlier 

 period, usurping the 

 central part of the 

 flower. Thus, when a 

 rose is borne on a pe- 

 duncle rising from the centre of a rose, which is 

 not very unusual, or a leafy stem from the top 

 of a pear (Fig. 323), the flower was probably 

 complete before the monstrous growth set in. In 

 Fig. 324, the reversion to foliaceous growth took 

 effect after the stamens but before the pistils 

 were formed. In rose-buds out of roses, the terminal proliferous 

 shoot takes at once the form of a peduncle ; in the shoot from 

 the pear, that of a leaf} 7 stem. 



313. Again, axillary buds are normally formed in the axil of 

 leaves. No such branching is known in a normal flower. But 

 in rare monstrosities a bud (mostly a 



flower-bud) makes its appearance in the 



axil of a petal or of a stamen ; and it 



may be clearly inferred that the organ 



(not itself axillary) from the axil of / 



which a bud develops is a leaf or its N 



homologue. Fig. 325 exhibits a clear 



case of the kind, a flower in the axil 



of each petal of Celastrus scandens. Flowers, or pedunculate 



clusters of flowers, from the axil of petals of garden Pinks are 



sometimes seen. A long-pedunculate flower from the axil of a 



FIG. 323. A monstrous pear, prolonged into a leafy branch ; from Bonnet. 



FIG. 324. Retrograde metamorphosis of a flower of the Fraxinella of the gardens, 

 from Lindley's Theory of Horticulture ; an internode elongated just above the stamens, 

 and hearing a whorl of green leaves. 



FIG. 325. A flower of False Bittersweet (Celastrus scandens) producing other 

 flowers in the axils of the petals ; from Turpin. 



