Proceedings 57 
The first business of such a seedling therefore is to transfer 
the stores of food present in the seed to some safe position 
underground. For this purpose it converts its stem into a 
store-house, and plunges it into the soil. This is the most 
imperative work of the first season. The formation of green 
organs to renew the stock of food when it gets low is a 
minor consideration. The seedling cannot afford to waste 
much material in this task when time is so short and its 
underground development so essential to existence. So 
there is a very marked tendency among geophilous seed- 
lings to reduce the green aérial organ during the first 
seasons of growth. 
We have here a cause which has operated on some un- 
doubted Dicotyledons, such as Zranthis and Podophyllum, 
to produce partial union of the cotyledons. There is reason 
to think that the single cotyledon of other Dicotyledons, 
Ranunculus Ficaria for example, and Cyclamen, is the result 
of complete union which has come about in a similar way. 
It can hardly be doubted that the like causes persisting for 
a long period might produce a monocotylous race, 
Assuming then that a dicotylous stock was driven by 
stress of circumstanes to become geophilous, the reduction 
of the green organs in the first-year seedling follows in- 
evitably, and forms such as Podophyllum, Eranthis, Ranun- 
culus Ficaria, show that this reduction may take the form 
of a partial or complete union of the cotyledons. If Mono- 
cotyledons, as we know them, are descended from a race 
developed in this way from ancestors which resembled 
modern Dicotyledons in essential features, some at least of 
the other characters which distinguish them ought to be 
referable to the geophilous habit. 
The first of these characters in importance is the anatomy 
of the stem, and as there is independent evidence to show 
that the Primitive Flowering Plant possessed a cambium, 
I am bound to explain how Monocotyledons lost it by the 
adoption of a geophilous habit. I have attempted elsewhere 
_ to show that this consequence is perfectly natural,* but the 
_ * The Evolution of Monocotyledons, Bot. Gazette, 1904, XX XVII. 
p. 336, 
