On the Physiology of Vegetables. 345 
form the important ingredients that come from the root. . The 
heart must always proceed from the radicle, and be formed there, 
and running up the alburnum into the seed-vessels, but doing so 
it is subject to get bruised and injured: therefore, when it is so, 
another immediately supplies its place before it is fructified, but 
not till the heart has got into its right place. It appears to go 
through some trial, which not sustaining, it decays and disap- 
pears, and another takes its place. I] have known three banished 
__thus, one after the other ; but they never pass further into the 
~ bag than a,a,a, but dry away and disappear, while another 
(the first in the line), h, h, h, fig. 3. lakes us place; and the 
others in the stalk in time form: other vessels required. The 
corns and grasses are the only plants whose heart of the seed 
moves after once entering the case. In wheat it first euters at 
the top; and when it has taken all its nutriment from the at- 
mosphere, it falls to the stalk of the seed (d,d,d) and is there fixed 
firmly and remains stationary. ‘The reason why the Gramina 
differ from all other plants in this respect is, that the seminal 
leaves are at. the bottom instead of the top af the seed, and the 
heart must be placed close to them, or it could not take in its 
oxygen; and-as it is then (as leaves are ever) the lungs to. the 
young plant, it is constantly supplied not with food but with oxy- 
gen from the seminal leaves. This at once proves also that I 
am right with respect to that point: indeed, unless botanists 
will. dissect progressively aud daily, at ‘least tie two or three 
years, it is quite impossible they should not continually take one 
part for another, one ingredient for the one resembling it. 
I have for the last two months watched from-day to day this 
curious process in the gourd and the wheat, and followed each 
plant from the moment the bud began to appear till it had 
completed’ its seed; and each day was a different picture. If 
then the process changes so perpetually i in the interior, how is 
a phytologist to know any thing of the matter, if he will not 
look into the plants continually? the exterior is the mere fish of 
the provess; without this interior 1 should never have acquired 
the knowledge I have gained of the manner in which, plants 
form; or feel so sure of being able thoroughly to depend on 
the facts I advance in all this varied and complicated picture. 
If I bad not exactly copied from Nature. would not the facts 
long ago have contradicted each other? Their sery consistency 
proves their truth. Thus then, after all the trials I have made, all 
the dissections I have observed and drawn, and the constant 
watching and study of upwards of seventeen years, the whole re- 
sult of the regulation of plants is this: That the root is the da- 
boratory of plants ; that the vessels which run up being Zoo 
small to adinit whole seeds, whole flowers —all these purts are 
commenced, 
