TRANSACTIONS OF SECTION K. 819 



Section K.— BOTANY. 

 President of the Section. — Professor I. Batiet Balfottb, D.Sc, F.R.S. 



THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 19. 

 The President delivered the following Address : — 



I SHOULD be wanting in my duty, alike to yon and to our science, were I at the 

 outset of our proceedings to pass over without notice the circumstances of environ- 

 ment in which we assemble to-day. In this, the first year of the century, our 

 Section meets for the first time in Scotland, and finds itself housed in this magni- 

 ficent Botanical Institute, which, through the energy and devotion of Professor 

 Bower, has been added this year to the equipment of Botany in thLs country. A 

 few months ago the Institute was opened in the happiest auspices and with all the 

 distinction that the presence of our veteran botanist, Sir Joseph Hooker, supported 

 by two other ex- Presidents of the Royal Society — Lord Lister and Lord Kelvin — 

 could give to the ceremony. I am sure we will cordially echo the words of good- 

 will that were spoken on that occasion. It must be to all of us a matter of con- 

 gratulation that Botany has now provided for it in Glasgow this Institute both 

 for its teaching and for the investigation of its inner secrets, and we may with 

 confidence hope that the output of valuable additions to our knowledge of plant- 

 life which has marked Glasgow during the tenure of office of its present dis- 

 tinguished Professor of Botany, and in which he himself has borne so large a share, 

 will not only continue but will increa.se in a ratio not incommensurate with the 

 facilities that are now provided. 



The subject of my address is the group of Angiosperms. I will speak gene- 

 rally of some points in their construction from the point of view of their position as 

 the dominant vegetation of the earth's surface at the present time, and more par- 

 ticularly of their relationship to water, as it is one which has much to do with 

 their holding the position they now have. I wish, however, in the first place to 

 refer to 



The Communal Organisation of Angiosperms. 



No fact of the construction of the plant-body that has been established within 

 recent years is of greater importance than that of the continuity of protoplasm in 

 pluricellular plants. As has been the case with so many epoch-making discoveries, 

 we owe our first knowledge of this to the work of a British botanist. The de- 

 monstration by Gardiner of the existence of intei-cellular protoplasmic connections 

 is the foundation of our modern notion of the constitution of the pluricellular 

 plant-body and of the far-reaching conception of the communal organisation of 

 Angiosperms and of all other Metaphyta.^ It has settled, once and for all, 



' Metaphyta and its antonym Protophyta are well-established names for groups of 

 polyergic and monergic plants respectively. The recent appropriation of Metaphyta 

 as a group name for Vasculares, i.e., plants derived from the second antithetic 

 generation, and of Protophyta for Cellulares, i.e., plants derived from the first anti- 

 thetic generation, is unfortunate. 



