CASPARY ON TnE MORPHOLOGY OF THE ABIETINEJ3. 25 



HO that no one who has learned even the elements of morphological 

 botany, can help recognising them as leaves, and as the primary and 

 only leaves prodnced on the evanescent axis. 



3. From the two lateral organs spring those third in order, 

 namely, the ovules. 



Nowit is certainly wonderful, but it is not the less true, that Baillon 

 and Payer, failing to distingidsh the second organs (the lateral 

 leaves) from the first, though Baillon's description is sufficiently 

 accurate, have confounded both together, and considered them to be 

 a single organ, called by Payer a flattened form of the peduncle ; 

 thus rashly following Schleiden, (who, more than twenty years before 

 fell into the same mistake, of describing the axis and its primordial 

 leaves as a simple axis), and Mirbel,* who 46 years before confounded 

 these three very distinct kinds of organs under the common name of 

 peduncle. 



Payer further says,t that " this flattened form of peduncle does 

 not surprise those who are aware of its existence in the branches of 

 se ^ eral plants, such as Suscus, X^IopJiyJI a, Phyllocladus, &c." No 

 one, however, but a tjro in morphology, would confound the scale of 

 Pinus resinosa, on whose upper surface, almost in its middle, the 

 growing point rises as the hooked apex of an evanescent axis, utterly 

 distinct both in position and direction, from the morphological apex 

 of the lamina of the proper scale, with the flattened branches of 

 Puscus, &c., whose withered growing point occiipies the very apex 

 of the lamina, and in which no trace of appendicular organs is found 

 below the growing point. 



Baillon, in a somewhat impressive manner observes, after stating 

 some opinions of others on the structure of the flowers of Conifers, that 

 " the new modes of observation afibrded by the study of organogeny, 

 may with propriety be applied to the verification of these opinions." 

 M. Baillon may learn, from the mistakes into which he has been led by 

 the employment of a method which he and Payer alone imagine to 

 be new, that the different grades of evolution of an organ, caunot be 

 understood -vvdthout an accurate knowledge of the nature of the axis 

 and its appendages, and of the relations which exist between them. 

 M. Baillon, however, hardly knows the elements of morphology. How, 

 for instance, does it happen, that, at the present day, he uses the 

 term alternate,^ which was thus applied a century ago, to describe 

 the arrangement of the bracts of the female flowers of Conifers ? 



Dr. Lindley,§ who considers the scales of pine cones to be carpels, 

 (that is, leaves), refers to a cone-like gall oi Pinus ahies, figm-ed by 

 Iiichard,|| which he mistakes for a cone, and in which he regards the 

 scales as being changed into the form of the acicular leaves of Pinus 

 ahies. Baillon has been led by Lindley into the same mistake, of 

 regarding this gall as a cone, and only differs from Lindley, so far, 

 that he thinks it is not the scales but the bracts which are changed 



* Elemens de physiol, vegetale, 1815, i. p. 347. f In Baillon's paper, p. 20. 

 t 1. c. p. 6. § Veg. Kingd. p. 227. |i Mem. t. xii. 



