VOLUME LXxI | NUMBER 1 
THe 
beoTANICAL CZAZETIFC 
JANUARY 1921 
PHYSIOLOGICAL AND MORPHOLOGICAL 
CORRELATIONS IN HERBACEOUS 
ANGIOSPERMS' 
E. C. JEFFREY AND R. E. TORREY 
(WITH PLATES I-VII AND FOUR FIGURES) 
‘The general significance of the herbaceous type seems to have 
first been clearly realized in the classification of plants put forward 
by Cxusrus in the seventeenth century. This author divided 
plants into large groups based on their habit, much in the same 
manner that the earlier zoological classifications summarized 
animals under such groups as flying, creeping, swimming, etc. 
The idea, however, has long been abandoned that the habit of life 
can serve as a satisfactory basis for either systematic or phy- 
logenetic classification. This consideration does not in any way 
eliminate the herbaceous type as a physiological assemblage of the 
greatest importance in the present epoch of the history of the 
earth. In this connection the question arises as to the origin of a 
physiological group which is of such high significance. The older 
view implicitly, if not in actual statement, assumed for the herba- 
ceous type a position of primitiveness. This attitude is well illus- 
trated by such classics as GrAy’s Structural Botany and Sacus’s 
Lehrbuch. In these works the woody stem is represented dia- 
grammatically as originating from the linking up of originally 
* Contribution from the Laboratories of Plant Morphology of Harvard University. 
I 
