42 



In making an experiment last fall to find 

 out the function of the cot)4edons of the 

 pea, b)- placing the radicles of very young 

 seedlings in water, eight or ten girls in my 

 botany classes reported that they had peas 

 with three plumules. When they brought 

 them to class, for inspection, I found that 

 each of these seedlings had the ordinary 

 shoot from the plumule and a shoot from 

 the tiny bud in the axil of each cotyledon. 

 These buds make their appearance at an 

 early stage of germination, whether the peas 

 are germinated in earth or on moist blotting 

 paper, but among the thousands of seedling 

 peas which I have dug up from the germin- 

 ating boxes in the Girls' High School, I do 

 not remember to have found one in which 

 these buds had developed into shoots ex- 

 cept in seedlings whose terminal bud (plu- 

 mule) had been destroyed. In this emer- 

 gency, the growth of one or both of these 

 axillary buds is to be expected ; I have often 

 Fig. c. Seedling show- induced it by pinching off the plumules of 

 ing shoots from plumule young Seedlings growing with the radicles 

 and from bud in axil of ^^ water, and it is interesting to note that 



each cotyledon. , , ^ , i , i-r i i 



the shoots irom these buds lilt themselves 

 in an arch, just as the shoot from the plumule does. So far as 

 my own observations go, the development of shoots from buds 

 in the axils of cotyledons in addition to the shoot from the plu- 

 mule is rare, and it is difficult to explain why so many seedlings 

 should have shown that tendency the past sea.son. 



Girls' IIu;h School, Bkooki.yn, 

 December 27, 1904. 



