GENESIS. 



225 



that sucli a relation exists. Uniaxial plants begin to 



produce their lateral, flowering axes, only after the main 

 axis has developed the great mass of its leaves, and is show- 

 ing its diminished nutrition by smaller leaves, or shorter 

 internodes, or both. In multiaxial plants, two, three, or 

 more generations of leaf-bearing axes, or sexless individuals, 

 are produced before any seed-bearing individuals show them- 

 selves. When, after this first stage of rapid growth and 

 agamogenetic multiplication, some gamogenetic individual? 

 arise, they do so where the nutrition is least ; — not on the 

 main axis, or on the secondary axes, or even on the tertiary 

 axes ; but on axes that are the most removed from the 

 channels which supply nutriment. Again, a flowering axis 

 is commonly less bulky than the others : either much 

 shorter, or, if long, much thinner. And further, it is an 

 axis of which the terminal internodes are undeveloped: the 

 foliar organs, which instead of becoming leaves become sepals, 

 and petals, and stamens, follow each other in close succession, 

 instead of being separated by portions of the still-growing 

 axis. Another group of evidences meets us, when 



we observe the variations of fruit-bearing that accompany 

 variations of nutrition, in the plant regarded as a whole. 

 besides finding, as above, that gamogenesis commences only 

 when the luxuriance of early growth has been somewhat 

 checked, by the extension of the remoter parts of the plant to 

 some distance from the roots ; we find that gamogenesis is 

 induced at an earlier stage than usual, by checking the nutri- 

 tion Trees are made to fruit while still quite small, by 

 cutting their roots, or putting them in pots ; and luxuriant 

 branches which have had the flow of sap into them diminished, 

 Dy what gardeners call *^ ringing," begin to produce flower- 

 shoots instead of leaf-shoots. Moreover, it is to be remarked 

 that trees which, by flowering early in the year, seem to 

 show a direct relation between gamogenesis and increasing 

 nutrition, really do the reverse ; for in such trees, the flower- 

 buds are formed in the autumn — that structure which deter- 



