184 



Corresponding germination of seeds, still within the ripe head 



of the parent plant, is not particularly common unless unusually 



favorable conditions for germination exist under which the heads 



are, through some abnormal circumstance, held captive. Such 



a case is shown by specimens in our collection of the heads of 



the common burdock. 



Museum of the Brooklyn Institute 

 OF Arts and Sciences 



THE FERTILIZATION OF THE EEL-GRASS 



[The availability of the subjoined extract for Torreya has 

 been a matter of considerable speculation and not a little mis- 

 giving. It is one of thirty diminutive essays, all in a similar 

 vein, and all highly charged with the imaginative poetry of the 

 greatest of our modern mystic poets. The editor'would have had 

 little misgiving if the acceptance of the "botany" of this excerpt 

 were as sure as its instant recognition as literature of a particu- 

 larly charming style. Doubtless there are botanists who will 

 question the writer, with a degree of vehemence measured by 

 their antipathy to things of the imagination, when applied to 

 their chosen science. But whatever of alleged "nature-faking" 

 the unbeliever thinks he reads into the paragraphs below, it 

 were well to remember that the writer, except for a trivial 

 error, enclosed in square brackets, is perfectly correct as to 

 his facts, and that it is only with his interpretation of them that 

 one has any true quarrel. And it is precisely at these interpreta- 

 tive features of the essay that many botanists will become most 

 excited. Not a few will immediately wax expansive over the 

 perfectly irrelevant commonplace that plants do not "feel," nor 

 "see," nor do a score of things that an imaginative writer may 

 credit them with doing. All the while forgetting, that by the 

 exercise of his imagination, a writer with a somewhat different 

 perspective from that of the average botanist, may so change 

 the point of view, so visualize the every-day, common thing, 

 that the reader will never quite look at it with his customary 

 indifference; never quite put it into the category of those in- 



