1 66 JOURNAL AND PROCEEDINGS. 



NOTES ON BIOLOGICAL SUBJECTS. 



Read before the Biological Section of the Hamilton Association, during the 

 Session ^ i8gi-2, 



BY WILLIAM YATES, OF HATCHLEY, ONT. 



Scarcely a summer passes without offering something singular id 

 the floral or vegetable world ; and gardeners and tillers of the soil 

 have many opportunities of detecting and making note of these 

 freaks and deviations from the ordinary routine of plant growth. 

 Several such instances of abnormality occured and were noted by 

 me during the growing season of 1891, to wit : — A peculiar instance 

 of the phenomenon called " Fasciculation," occurred in a garden in 

 the township of Burford. The specimen was found amidst a large 

 group of Sunflowers, Helianthus annuus, and what at first sight 

 seemed a si?igle head of unusual size, proved on further develop- 

 ment to be a combination of three heads. The line of juncture was 

 distinctly traceable by the green scales or sepals of the involucre, 

 and also by the yellow ligulate florets of the ray forcing themselves 

 distinctly into notice amid the florets of the disc, and in lines that 

 bisected the circular outline of the usual sunflower head. This 

 was done as accurately as if the same problem had been propounded 

 to a student of Euclid. 



The deviation from the ordinary growth of these flowers 

 suggested the question to my mind whether this was an instance of 

 a partial reverting to the ancestral type of the Helianthus? What 

 would seem to make this supposition a natural one is the fact that 

 a common wild form of the Sunflower is the species dtvaricatus, 

 which we have often found growing in the woods not far from here ; 

 and florists know that by cutting back side shoots the vigor and 

 bulk substance of many plants and shrubs can be concentrated in a 

 single stem, 



I may add that I had some reason to conjecture that the 

 oddity of floral growth, that we have described above, was the 



