82 THE PALM-STEM : 



nately, in my own case, only too well founded, and if I 

 venture, notwithstanding that I have not the appliances 

 of the Paris Academician, to subject his researches to a 

 criticism, I know well the difficulty of my undertaking, 

 yet I hope that the reasons which I have to adduce will 

 not be without weight. That the first glance at the sec- 

 tion of a Palm -bud will not force the conviction upon every 

 one, that the fibres grow from below upwards, is proved 

 most decisively by Gardner saying, that the greatest 

 sceptic would only need to see a longitudinal section of a 

 Palm-stem bearing its leaves, to be convinced that its 

 woody substance is formed from the leaves (Annals of 

 Nat. History, vi, 61.) I unfortunately had no larger 

 buds at my disposal than the terminal buds of a stem of 

 Cocos fleocuosa about two inches thick, and of young 

 stems of Phoenix. From an examination of these buds 5 

 made in reference to Mirbel's views, I have nothing to ob- 

 ject to the correctness of his anatomical statement, that in 

 Phoenix the vascular bundles running to the young leaves 

 of the bud, are harder and more developed below the phyllo- 

 phore than in it, where they are in a soft, gelatinous con- 

 dition. But does the conclusion deduced from this fact by 

 Mirbel, that the lower parts of the bundles are older than 

 the upper, necessarily follow from it ? At first sight, 

 undoubtedly, since it is a general fact that young woody 

 bundles are soft, old ones hard. But it is a totally different 

 question, whether the hardness of them is connected simply 

 with their age, or at the same time and in a higher degree 

 with the stage of development of the part in which the 

 vascular bundles lie. Mirbel assumes the former ; I be- 

 lieve the latter may be proved. Calling to mind that in 

 the articulated plants with elongated internodes, as in 

 the Grasses, Pinks, in Ephedra, a yet imperfectly-deve- 

 loped internode is already completely hardened above, 

 where it is exposed to the air, while below, so far as it is 

 inclosed by the sheath of the lower leaf or verticil of leaves, 

 its internode is still of an herbaceous softness, we have 

 here a case which stands in the most glaring contradic- 



