PROLIFERATION. 



31 



in this way and sense, for the type of shoot and leaf 

 developed in the proliferated flower will, of course, be 

 characteristic of the plant of the present day and 

 similar to that of its own normal vegetative parts. In 

 a proliferated flower, in its extreme form, all the four 

 kinds of floral leaves — sepals, petals, stamens, and 

 carpels — become changed into foliage-leaves like those 

 of the vegetative part of the plant, and where " in- 

 ferior " ovaries occur, as in the rose, they vanish 

 entirely. The axis also branches very often, which 

 is another aspect of the ancestral complexity. 



The great majority of people would probably agree 

 that highly congested structures like the spike of a 

 plantain or a grass, the capitulum of a daisy or 

 scabious, the catkin of a hazel, are not primitive struc- 

 tures, but, on the contrary, highly modified from some 

 much laxer, larger, and more complex type of inflor- 

 escence. Hence it would be easier for the sceptic to 

 admit that the abnormal proliferated forms of such 

 structures as have been above described are giving 

 some indication by their change of what the ancestral 

 inflorescence was like. 



The matter becomes much more difficult when we 

 have to deal with structures so highly modified in their 

 normal condition that we can no longer tell to what 

 morphological category they belong, e. g. the ovuli- 

 ferous parts of Coniferge. Yet few would deny nowa- 

 days that the cones, both male and female, of Coniferee 

 represent extremely congested and reduced structures ; 

 hence any process of branching which is set up in 

 them during the course of abnormal modification is, 

 on the face of it, as likely as not, to represent a 

 tendency towards reproducing a more ancestral con- 

 dition, however far back this is to be sought. 



But it cannot be too strongly insisted upon that in 

 most, if not all, of these cases we have not to do with 

 a direct reversion to the condition of a particular type 

 which has existed in the past in this particular form ; 

 but the proliferations are to be considered as the 



