STRUCTURE OF FLOWERS. 131 



3d. Ordinary leaves, when they are atrophied or 

 coloured, can take the appearance of petals, but they 

 always differ much, and we never see them produce any 

 thing analogous to the sexual organs. The leaves of the 

 flower, on the contrary, are, in their ordinary state, very 

 different from the preceding ; but, in certain cases, they 

 completely take their characters, except the existence of 

 axillary buds. Can the position of these organs explain 

 this difference? Is there any means of joining the ver- 

 ticillate position of the leaves of the flower, with the 

 frequently very different one of the ordinary leaves of 

 the same plant ? This last point would be of great 

 importance in this, — that it would completely connect 

 the history of the reproductive organs with that of the 

 organs of vegetation ; but the efforts made to attain this 

 object are as yet too hypothetical and incomplete to be 

 mentioned. 



A curious example tends to confirm the extreme 

 analogy of the leaves with the floral parts. There is 

 cultivated in gardens a monstrosity of the White Lily, 

 in which, in the place of the flowers, the extremity of 

 each branch bears an indefinite number of leaves dis- 

 posed spirally, or imbricated as the ordinary ones, but 

 which are distinguished because they are coloured, and 

 entirely petaloid ; they differ then from the parts of the 

 flower only in not being verticillate. 



From all the examples and the analogies which I have 

 pointed out, we may conclude, as the illustrious poet 

 Goethe maintained; as several botanists of the German 

 school, and especially Rceper, have admitted; as Turpin 

 has partly developed in his Iconographie ; as Mr. Robert 

 Brown appears to admit in different passages scattered 

 throughout his works; as I have myself partially indi- 

 cated in several of mine ; we may, I say, conclude that 

 the leaves, or appendicular organs of the stem, modified 



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