THE 



PHILOSOPHICAL MAGAZINE 

 AND JOURNAL. 



I. On the Physiology of Botany. By Mrs. Ibbetson. 



To Mr. Tilloch. 



Sir, — ixs I am precluded from presenting to the public that 

 work now ready for the press, by an opposition that in my pre- 

 sent state of weakness I am wholly unable to stem ; vet I can- 

 not but make one effort more to introduce to my countrymen 

 that beautiful series of facts in botanical physiology, which ap- 

 pear to me unanswerable, and could only have been procured 

 by means oi progressive dissection, following each ingredient of 

 flower-bud, seed, pollen,^&c. &c. from the place in which they 

 were made, and from the moment of their formation in the in- 

 terior one year, till they are completed, and then decayed at the 

 exterior the next year. 



In my application to booksellers I was assured, that after 

 consulting the first botanists, it was decided that no new facts 

 were wanted. I confess I was so simple as to think, after a long 

 progressive study, that no part of the physiology of a plant was 

 known; that we neither knew where the flower-bud was formed, 

 the embryo of the seed protruded, and particularly what, caused 

 the very visible motion so apparent in a plant ; lior did we un- 

 derstand how the root differed from the stem, or the stem from 

 the new shoot. Yet all these points are the chief foundation of 

 vegetable oeconomy, the laws by which they are governed, and 

 follow each other with such perfect precision, that the first may 

 be said almost mathematically to prove the rest. 



It is the opinion of botanists in general, and of Sir Ed. Smith 

 and Mr. Knight in particular, that the flower-bud (Plate I. 

 fig. 1, dd) is formed in the alburnum. It is then made at the 

 exterior of the wood : and it is ratlier impossible to conceive 

 how the wood when cut into floors or planes, should be marked 

 all the way not only with knots but with young buds just 

 starting from the line of life next the pith. 



Vol. 5G. No. 267. July 1820. A 2 View 



