170 CAUSES OF BARRENNESS, &C. 



This doctrine being espoused by some of the most 

 distinguished botanists of the age, it is painful to be 

 compelled to doubt the accuracy of such authorities. 

 Perhaps it is necessary to dip deeply into the abstract 

 science of physiology, before we can comprehend the 

 arcana of vegetable transformations. Mere practical 

 discernment cannot exercise such powers of imagina- 

 tion as to conceive, that by checking the free growth 

 of a tree, it will induce an accumulation of matured 

 sap, which shall operate so as to stunt the points of 

 the branches into flowers turn the most simple 

 appendages of the exterior into the interior and 

 transform these inferior organs into the principal and 

 most important of the system. Can any practical 

 man imagine, that by checking the growth by trans- 

 plantation cutting the roots ringing or disbarking 

 a tree, that such violence will gain a greater share of 

 matured sap? impossible. On the contrary, he 

 knows the effects will be injurious to the whole 

 system ; and though the fructiferous principles will 

 be called into action as the final effort of a sickly 

 tree, this result is not from an accumulation of sap, 

 but the very reverse. Surely accidental metamor- 

 phoses may be acknowledged as such without over- 

 turning the natural order of vegetable develop- 

 ment. 



Whether the old or the new ideas on this impor- 

 tant point of vegetable physiology, be the more cor- 

 rect, or whether the one or the other be faithful 

 descriptions of the origin and conformation of flowers, 



