SOME VEGETABLE MALFORMATIONS. 



319 



four inches in some places, while its thickness is less than half an 

 inch. Numerous small side branches arise from the broad surface 

 of this peculiar shoot, while the end is made up of a large number 

 of small buds fused to- 

 gether. As they grow, 

 the individual stems lose 

 their identity in the 

 common belt of blended 

 shoots. The photograph 

 is made from a specimen 

 brought last spring to 

 the writer's laboratory, 

 where the upper foot or 

 more is still to be seen 

 preserved in a large mu- 

 seum jar. 



The sweet - potato 

 vine perhaps most fre- 

 quently illustrates this 

 broadening of the stem, 

 but upon a less grand 

 scale than that shown 

 in the asparagus. Only 

 last week a student 

 brought me a plant in 

 which all the several 

 vines were like ribbons, 

 an inch or more in 

 width and several feet 

 in length. It is only a 

 singular instance of a 

 failure of the young 

 formative branches to 

 separate as they are de- 

 veloped from the closely situated buds at the tip ; but that this 

 failure should be constant in all the branches of a plant is more 

 difficult to explain. 



The reader will call to mind several other kinds of plants that 

 illustrate this same abnormity, to which botanists have given 

 the name of fasciation, from the resemblance of the stem to a 

 bandage. Larkspur and dahlia stems sometimes show the same 

 peculiarity, and, should we here include flower-stalks, the dande- 

 lion would afford abundant examples, for the long, hollow scapes 

 ■ are frequently doubled or flattened to a ribbon that sometimes 

 has not strength enough to support the abnormal head of flowers. 

 The garden "cockscomb" (Celosia) owes its attractiveness largely 



Fig. 1. — Asparagus Fasciation. 



