94 
WILLIAM SEIFRIZ 
In one respect, however, the periodicity of Chusquea differs strikingly 
from the cycle of annuals and the aging of organisms. That the span of 
life of an individual Chusquea is thirty-three years is no more remarkable 
and is as satisfactorily explainable as is the fact that an annual lives one 
year, man eighty years, and a Sequoia 5,000 years. But an hypothesis 
which will explain these phenomena is not necessarily sufficient to account 
for the simultaneous flowering of fully 98 percent of the individuals of a 
species extending over a great stretch of country. 
There is as yet, it seems to me, no adequate explanation of the behavior 
of Chusquea. That seasonal factors at present active bring on this simul- 
taneous flowering is very unlikely. That past climatic influences are 
responsible is quite possible. But the ultimate cause I should be inclined 
to search for in the physical and chemical make-up of its protoplasm ; fully 
realizing, however, the possibility, indeed the probability, that this very 
nature of the protoplasm has come to be what it is in part because of its 
past environment as well as because of its own original constitution. 
Botanical Laboratory, 
Johns Hopkins University 
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3. Bean, W. J. The flowering of cultivated bamboos. Kew Bulletin 1907: 228-233. 
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Nat. Herb. 18: 261-471. 1917. 
5. Morris, D. Chusquea abietifolia. Gardener's Chronicle 20: 524. 1886. 
6. Chase, Agnes. Notes on the climbing bamboos of Porto Rico. Bot. Gaz. 58: 277-279. 
1914. 
7. Hackel, E. Gramineae. Engler and Prantl, Natiirlichen Pflanzenfamilien. 11,2:90. 
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9. Bruckner, E. Klimaschwankungen. Vienna, 1890. 
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