MODES OF REPRODUCTION IN PLANTS. 159 



individual wills ; and laws the disregard of which must be fraught 

 with disaster. 



And then, in the third place, there is that mass of guiding informa- 

 tion yielded by the records of law-making in our own country and in 

 other countries, which still more obviously demands attention. Here 

 and elsewhere attempts of multitudinous kinds, made by kings and 

 statesmen, have failed to do the good intended and have worked unex- 

 pected evils. Century after century new measures like the old ones, 

 and other measures akin in princijjle, have again disappointed hopes 

 and again brought disaster. And yet it is thought neither by electors 

 nor by those they elect that there is any need for systematic study of 

 that legislation which in by-gone ages went on working the ill-being 

 of the people when it tried to achieve their well-being. Surely there 

 can be no fitness for legislative functions without wide knowledge of 

 those legislative experiences which the past has bequeathed. 



Reverting, then, to the analogy drawn at the outset, we must say 

 that the legislator is morally blameless or morally blameworthy ac- 

 cording as he has or has not acquainted himself with these several 

 classes of facts. A physician who, after years of study, has gained a 

 competent knowledge of physiology, jjathology and therapeutics, is not 

 held criminally responsible if a man dies under his treatment ; he has 

 prepared himself as well as he can, and has acted to the best of his 

 judgment. Similarly the legislator whose measures produce evil in- 

 stead of good, notwithstanding the extensive and jnethodic inquiries 

 which helped him to decide, can not be held to have committed more 

 than an error of reasoning. Contrariwise, the legislator who is wholly 

 or in great measure uninformed concerning these masses of facts which 

 he must examine before his opinion on a proposed law can be of any 

 value, and who nevertheless helps to pass that law, can no more be ab- 

 solved if misery and mortality result, than the journeyman druggist 

 can be absolved when death is caused by the medicine he ignorantly 

 prescribes. 



MODES OF EEPRODUCTIO^ IX PLANTS. 



By BYEOX D. HALSTED, Sc. D. 



THE sexual generation of a plant is that stage in its life-history 

 which bears the male and female organs, while the asexual gen- 

 erations are those having no sexuality manifest. The two kinds of 

 generations frequently follow each other in alternate order, when there 

 is what is known as an alternation of generations. 



Growing plants continue to increase in size in a well-defined man- 

 ner for a time, and then a single cell, or a small group of cells, begins 

 on a new line of development. This new growth finally becomes de- 



