The Organism and its Major Parts 39 



forest fire, will put out thousands of shoots. That these 

 arise from the cambium I am assured by Dr. Percy Brandt, 

 a botanist who has given special attention to the matter. 

 Now I ask the reader to reflect on what is before us here. 

 When the tree's life not merely as an individual but as a 

 potential parent is destroyed, so far as all visible evidences 

 are concerned, one of the general tissues of the stump, its 

 cambium layer, proceeds forthwith to do what under the 

 normal Hfe-conditions of the tree it does not do, namely, 

 produce new buds, each one a potential new redwood tree. 

 The indubitable facts compel us to recognize that any part 

 whatever of the cambium, at the base of the tree at least, is 

 capable of being diverted from its normal function and 

 made to do what it would not do except for the special con- 

 ditions imposed. I sa}- it is "made to do" these things rather 

 than merely that it "does" them as though from its own 

 inherent nature alone, simply because it does not do them 

 unless they are subjected to the xerj particular conditions 

 which are imposed, namely those of the destruction of the 

 normal propagative parts of the tree. 



Whether one has in mind the question of how the whole 

 cambium, normally not reproductive, becomes endowed with 

 reproductive power; or the negative side of the question, 

 that of why it should not be reproductive under normal 

 conditions, there is no way of reasoning adequately about 

 the causes of the phenomena without bringing in the tree 

 as a structural and functional whole. The redwood tree 

 as a whole is essential to a causal explanation of the ca- 

 pacit}^ of its cambium tissue. Efforts to escape such a rec- 

 ognition by resorting to conceptions like those of germ- 

 plasm and plantagens is unmitigated sophistry. 



The Individual Animal and Its Parts 



So obvious is it that in the full-grown individual of any 

 of the higher animals the organs and parts are in some 



