PHYSIOLOGY. | 313 
"The style, (§ 93), appears under a great variety 
of shapes. - All the known vegetable vessels compose 
it, and it has hollow tubes, which at the top are by 
a tender cellular texture fixed to the germen and the 
navel-string. 
Hedwig in his microscopical researches, found in the 
species of gourd, (cucurbita), and its kindred plants, 
near the stigma, hollow channeis, in which he de. 
tected a firm, yellow, gelatinous body, which in the 
gourd was quadrangular, ran through the whole 
extent of the style, and ended in the navel-string of 
the seed. It appeared solid, and incapable of carry- 
ing any fluid.» But as no doubt it has some office in 
the fecundation of the pollen, either as a conductor 
or as a conveying medium, he calls it conductor fruc- 
tijicationis. Its use, however, 1s not yet pertectly 
understood, and it is even not yet precisely as- 
certained, whether other plants have it, or if a 
different organization in other plants, answers the 
same purpose. 
The stigma consists of hollow channels, the struc- 
ture of which can be accurately viewed with the mi- 
croscope only. ‘Those channels or tubes: constitute 
the stigma. What the Terminology calls stigma, 
(§ 94), is not always the real stigma, a very small 
part of it only deserves this name; at other times, 
on the contrary, the whole style is stigma. 
The pappus, which is met with in compound 
flowers, (§ 72), and which exists completely form- 
ed in the ripe seeds, is certainly not to be consider- 
ed, with Rafn, as a mere unorganic lifeless fibre. 
te me it appears to consist of large elongations of 
' 
the 
