850 Dr. A. Braun on the Vegetable Individual. 



vKtllbtit any cessation of life. In favour of this view the fact 

 may be adduced, that a similar phsenomenon occurs in the nor- 

 mal process of development of plants and animals. As there 

 are animals which may spontaneously lose the posterior extremity 

 of their body during the course of their development, as e. g. 

 Cercaria, Comatula, Frogs, fee, so there are also numerous 

 plants in which the posterior extremity gradually dies off, and is 

 cast aside, during the course of growth, while the anterior end 

 of the shoot, which bears the punctum vegetationis, continues to 

 unfold ; as is seen in the growth of many Mosses, especially of 

 Peat-mosses ; in the creeping and climbing root-stocks of Ferns 

 and Aroidece; in the long creeping stems of Lysimachia nummu' 

 laria ; the little subterranean creeping root-stocks of Paris ; in 

 most plants which possess a radix prcsmorsa, as e. g. Succisa pra- 

 tensis, the perennial species of Plantago, in Tormentilla, &c., with 

 which the perennial bulbs of Monocotyledonous plants agree in 

 all essential respects ; and finally, this is especially remarkable 

 in Utinciilaria and in Selaginella increscentifolia, whose apices 

 only form close buds, and last through the winter, while all the 

 remaining parts of the shoots perish. If the shoot is indivisible 

 transversely, it is still less so longitudinally. There is not a 

 single case to prove that a shoot longitudinally divided can as 

 such continue to develope ; nor do we know of a single case where 

 such a longitudinal division takes place spontaneously. What 

 has been usually described as a bifurcation of the stalk depends 

 in the Phanerogamia in every case upon a true ramification 

 which takes its rise laterally close under the apex, as I have 

 have already described it in the case of Erythrcea pulchella. As 

 a normal formation no immediate division of the stalk occurs 

 among Phanerogamia ; for the phsenomenon known as " fascia- 

 tion,'' which might be adduced here, is always a monstrosity'*i; 



* Fasciation depends upon a real division of the punctum vegetationis 

 into two parts of equal importance ; in the simplest ease it produces a 

 simple division into two parts. Here neither of the two parts can be re- 

 garded as a branch of the other. If repeated bifurcations follow each 

 other in the same plane and in unbroken connexion, the well-known 

 ** ribbon and fan "-like forms arise, which however usually end at last in 

 single apices. Veiy rarely more than two parts lying in diiFerent planes 

 are produced by the division of the punctum vegetationis, a case which I 

 have noticed in the capitula of Composites. The rarest phsenomenon which 

 bears upon our subject is the annular fasciation, in which an annular border 

 arises from the simple point of vegetation, of which I shall speak more at 

 large in the following Part, when I compare the relations of growth in the 

 Cryptogamia. A division of the individual corresponding to fasciation in 

 phanerogams, and to dichotomy, its homologue, in many cryptogams, also 

 occurs in the animal kingdom, as appears especially in many genera of 

 corals, e. g. Caryophyllia, whose stocks are formed in this manner exclu- 

 sively, and in Astrcea and Favia, in which it appears in conjunction with 



