The Vegetable Individual in its relation to Species. 197 
favor of this view the fact may be adduced that a similar phe- 
nomenon occurs in the normal process of development of plants 
and animals. As there are animals which may spontaneously 
lose the posterior extremity of their body during the course of 
their development, as e.g., Cercaria, Comatula, frogs, etc., so 
there are also numerous plants in which the posterior extremity 
gradually dies off, and is cast aside, during the course of growth, 
while the anterior end of the shoot, which bears the punctum veg- 
etationis continues to unfold; as is seen in the growth of many 
mosses, especially of Peat-mosses, in the creeping and climbing 
rootstocks of Ferns and Aroidee, in the long creeping stems of 
ysimachia nummularia, the little subterranean creeping root- 
stocks of Paris, in most plants which possess a radix premorsa, 
as e. g., Succisa pratensis, the perennial species of Plantago, in 
Tormentilla, etc., with which the perennial bulbs of monocoty- 
ledonous plants agree in all essential respects ; and finally, this is 
especially remarkable in Utricularia, and in Selaginella incres- 
centifolia, whose apices only form close’ buds, and last through 
the winter, while all the remaining parts of the shoots perish. If 
the shoot is indivisible transversely, it is still less so longitudin- 
ally. There is nota single case to prove that a shoot longitu- 
dinally divided can as such continue to develop; nor do we know 
apex, as I have already described it in the case of Erythrea pul- 
chella. As a normal formation no immediate division of the 
walle occurs among Phanerogamia; for the phenomenon known 
as “ fasciation,” which might be adduced here, is always a mon- 
Sitosity.* "The stalk, or axis of the shoot, is hence indivisible in 
* Fasciation depends upon a real division of the punctum vegetationis into two 
Parts of equal importance ; in the simplest case it produces a simple division into 
parts. Here neither of the two parts can be regarded as a branch of the other, 
If repeated bifurcations follow each other in the same plane, and in unbroken con- 
pry! the well known “ribbon and fan” like forms arise which gage usually enc 
in single api two parts lying in different plane 
are reduced by the i _Very rarely more than two parts lying aa pepnts 
ticed in the capitula of Composite. The rarest phenomenon which bears upon our sub- 
Jéct is the ann iation, in which an annular r ari he 
Point of vegetation, of which I shall speak more at large in the following Part, when 
