STRUCTURE.] SCHYKOFPSKY's VIEWS. 385 



cette soudure des deux bords opposes de la feuille carpelli- 

 enne se fait constamment an moyen d'un corps intermediate 

 compose de tissu cellulaire et de vaisseaux nourriciers, et qui 

 tire son origine de la partie de la tige ou du pedoncule d'ou 

 nait le carpelle; c'est sur cette partie seulement, et jamais sur 

 le bord meme de la feuille carpellienne que sont attaches les 

 ovules ou rudimens des graines/ The cause of this apparent 

 obstinacy of De Candolle and his whole school, lies, in my 

 opinion, in this, that the party of his adversaries, not resting 

 upon the general laws of organisation, nor on data furnished 

 by nature, and not agreeing with the ruling theory as being 

 merely an indeterminate obscure sensation, only repeat, in 

 different words, almost the same thing which Linnaeus and 

 his followers had said a century before on the receptaculum 

 proprium of the seeds ; describing, if I may so express myself, 

 ignorantly, the phenomena they observe, without investi- 

 gating, so as to render complete, their organographic meaning. 

 It is to the acute countryman of Linnseus, Agardh, late pro- 

 fessor of botany at Lund, that the honour is due, on the one 

 hand, of having pointed out the errors of De Candolle's theory, 

 and on the other, of having applied to the flower and to the 

 fruit the general law of vegetable organisation ; according to 

 which there always appears in the axilla of the leaf, a bud, or 

 new shoot on which are developed, in their turn, leaves 

 bearing again in their axillae fresh buds. 



" Thinking it out of place here to enter into any critical 

 review of the small but acute composition of Agardh, pub- 

 lished at Lund, in 1828, under the title of Essai de reduire la 

 Physiologic vegetale a des Principes fondamentaux ', I shall only 

 say, that according to Agardh's theory, the organ which 

 bears the seeds is the representative of the branch or shoot 

 springing from the axilla of the carpellary leaf. 



f( Under the guidance of Bacon's rule for the study of 

 science, so especially applicable to the investigations of natu- 

 ralists ' Malo Academiam ruminantem, quam quse nova 

 detegit/ I applied myself, in the years 1831 and 1832, to 

 the investigation of the structure of fruits and seeds. My 

 intention was to ascertain how far facts bore out the theory 

 of the learned Swede, derived merely from the general laws 



VOL. i. c c 



