86 REPORT—1868. 
cuttings of plants, but in individuals in which the roots were uninjured, that the sap 
not only ascends by the vascular tissue, but that the same tissue acts in its turn as 
an absorbent, returning and distributing the sap which has been modified in the 
leaves. That this tissue acts some important part is clear from the constancy with 
which it is produced at a very early stage in adventitious buds, establishing a con- 
nexion between the tissues of the old and new parts. This appears also from the 
manner in which in true parasites a connexion is established between the vascular 
tissue of the matrix and its parasite, as shown by our President in his masterly 
treatise on Balanophorz, and more recently by Solms-Laubach in an elaborate 
memoir in Pringsheim’s Journal. It is curious that in organs so closely analogous 
to the trachez of insects a similar connexion should long since have been pointed 
out by Mr. Newport, in the case of certain insect parasites. 
A circumstance, again, which constantly occurs in the diseases of plants confirms 
the views of Mr. Herbert Spencer. In diseased turnips, grapes, potatoes, &c., it 
is especially the vascular tissue which is first gorged with the ulmates which are 
so characteristic of disease. 
Monsieur Casimir De Candolle, in a clever memoir on the morphology of leaves, 
has come to the conclusion, after studying the arrangement of their vascular tissue, 
that they are branches in which the side towards the axis, which he calls the pos- 
terior, is atrophied. This subject has been followed out in those organs which are 
considered as modifications of leaves, as, for example, stamens, in which he finds 
sometimes the posterior side, sometimes the anterior, atrophied. If his theory 
is true, this would result from the way in which they originated, and the reference 
they bore to contiguous organs. The subject is well worth attention, and may 
eventually throw considerable light on those anomalous cases in teratology which 
will not accommodate themselves to the usual theory of metamorphosis. Some of 
these cases are so puzzling and complicated, that a very clever botanist once told 
me, “ Monstrous flowers teach us nothing,’—not meaning to abjure all assistance 
from them, but simply to indicate that they may be deceptive. Such flowers as 
double primroses, and the strange developments on the corollas of some Gloxinias, 
may possibly receive their explanation from a careful study of the course of the 
vascular tissue. As the colour on the anterior and posterior order in the latter 
-case is reversed, the doctrine of dedoublement does not at all help us. 
Hofmeister, in his ‘ Handbuch der Physiologischen Botanik,’ has an important 
chapter on free-cell formation, which at the present moment is of great interest as 
connected with Mr. Darwin’s doctrine of Pangenesis. Mr. Rainey has showed 
that the formation of false cells takes place in the solutions of gum and other sub- 
stances; and if this is the case where no vital agency is concerned, we may well 
be ee for the formation of living cells in organizable lymph, or in other 
properly constituted matter. The curious cell-formation of Gum Tragacanth may 
be an intermediate case. Be this, however, as it may, we have examples of free- 
cell formation in the formation of nuclei, in the embryos of plants, and above all 
in the asci of ascomycetous fungi. In plants whose cells contain nuclei, new cells 
are never formed without the formation of new nuclei, the number of which ex- 
actly corresponds with that of the new cells. 
It would be unpardonable to finish these somewhat desultory remarks without 
adverting to one of the most interesting subjects of the day,—the Darwinian 
doctrine of Pangenesis. After the lucid manner, however, in which this doctrine 
was exjlained by Dr. Hooker in his opening address, I should be inclined to omit 
it altogether had [ not looked at it from a somewhat different point of view, so that 
I should not be trespassing upon your time in going over the same ground. Others, 
indeed, as Owen and Herbert Spencer, have broached something of the kind, but 
not to such an extent; for the Darwinian theory includes atavism, reversion, and 
inheritance, and embraces mental peculiarities as well as physical. The whole 
matter is at once so complicated, and the theory so startling that the mind at first 
naturally shrinks from the reception of so bold a statement. Like everything, 
however, which comes from the pen of a writer whom I have no hesitation, so far 
as my own judgment goes, in considering as by far the greatest observer of our age, 
whatever may be thought of his theories when carried out to their extreme results, 
the subject demands a careful and impartial consideration. Like the doctrine of 
