PHYTOGENESIS. 259 
for instance, does not always take place in such a manner that 
the parent plant separates itself entirely from them, and scat- 
ters them about singly, but it most frequently forms, previous 
to its own individual death, a peculiar organ, which places the 
offspring in a peculiar vital connexion with one another, and at 
the same time serves as a reservoir for a certain quantity of 
nutritive material, by which the first development of these 
young individuals is facilitated. But in most cases this organ 
is merely a metamorphosis of some other one with which we 
are already familiar, for example, the stem or the root, or, as 
in the potato, the axillary buds; and no scientific person. has 
therefore ever hesitated to speak of these things as mere por- 
tions of a plant, which continue to live as connecting members 
between the younger individuals after the death of that one 
which has generated them. On the other hand, a different 
course has been taken, where stem and root simultaneously, and 
therefore almost the entire totality of the plant, take part in 
the formation; and although the result in this case may per- 
haps be that there can be no question at all of an hetero- 
morphy of a known portion of a plant, still the physiological 
identity in the signification of this and the former part has 
not been maintained with precision, and the view has thus 
been obscured. 
Most manuals are silent upon this subject, as though it 
were quite self-evident that the tree was to be regarded as 
the perfect plant; and I believe it not difficult to prove that, 
where vegetable physiology still lies very deep in error, this par- 
ticular misconception is solely in fault. Two entirely distinct 
ideas have here been confounded, namely, the highest stage of 
development to which vegetable hfe can raise itself, and the 
type upon which the idea of the individual must be based. If, 
then, the first of these ideas may be maintained with regard to 
the tree, still the application of the second to it fails com- 
pletely in every respect, as has been very correctly asserted 
before by E. Meyer (Linnea, vii, p. 424). It necessarily per- 
tains to the notion of a plant, that it produces foliaceous organs 
on its stem, yet there is no tree which has leaves. Paradoxical 
as this may sound, it is still not the less true. It is a fact, of 
which certainly no botanist is ignorant, that no lignified part 
of a plant, even though it be only im its second year, is capable 
