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THE AMEBIC AN NATURALIST [Vol. XLIII 



mouths of babes and sucklings. Although our seedlings, 

 unlike the sucklings, are dumb, they are by no means 

 speechless. One of the most striking triumphs of modern 

 plant anatomy is to have discovered many examples of 

 recapitulationary confirmation of the principle of evolu- 

 tion. To take a modern and striking instance, let us con- 

 sider our common and flourishing northern genus, the oak. 

 You are all familiar with the very broad rays which con- 

 stitute so ornamental a feature of the structure of oak 

 wood. You are likewise doubtless aware that the weight 

 of paleobotanical evidence speaks for the derivation of 

 the oaks from ancestors resembling the chestnuts since 

 the older oaks approach the chestnuts both in their foliage 

 and in their reproductive organs. The wood of the chest- 

 nut differs, however, strikingly from that of oaks by the 

 entire absence of large rays. It has been recently dis- 

 covered that certain oaks of the gold-gravels (Miocene 

 Tertiary) of California have their large rays composed 

 of aggregations of smaller rays. In the seedlings of cer- 

 tain of our existing American oaks this condition, inter- 

 estingly enough, is a passing phase, which by the loss 

 of the separating fibers in the congeries of small rays 

 produces the characteristic large rays of the adult. This 

 condition of development in the living oaks is all the 

 more significant because in certain breech-fertilized or 

 chalazogamic amentiferous trees of the present epoch, 

 such as the alder, the hazel and the hornbeam, such aggre- 

 gated so called false rays are a permanent feature of 

 structure in the adult. From the anatomical side, in the 

 case of the lower Amentiferae, we have accordingly at 

 the same time an interesting example of the general 

 biological law of recapitulation and a confirmation of the 

 view expressed by Treub and Nawaschin, on evidence 

 from the gametophytic and reproductive side, that the 

 breech-fertilized Amentiferae are relatively primitive 

 angiosperms. 



Perhaps the most valuable service which anatomy is 

 rendering to phylogeny and evolution is in connection 



