562 Weiss. — The Vascular Branches of 
as supplying lateral rootlets, but he did not figure the latter, 
and he stated that owing to the minuteness of these strands, 
which do not exceed T V of a millimetre, 4 ce n’est done que 
dans des cas assez rares que les empreints pourront reproduire 
les cicatrices laissees par des radicelles.’ 
Such slender evidence, especially as the Stigmarian rootlets 
exhibit well-marked dichotomy, justified Williamson’s and 
Solms-Laubach’s refusal to accept Renault’s conclusions. Dr. 
Scott, though he has been able to observe these strands, states 
in his manuscript notes referred to above, with reference to 
a well-marked strand in one of his preparations (slide, No. 113), 
that ‘there is no sign of branching.’ In one of these rootlets 
he observed e an oblique strand of xylem running from the stele 
to the inner edge of the cortex.’ And indeed, as we shall see 
presently, that is as far as the strand generally goes. In the 
rootlet represented in Fig. 2 1 the termination of a vascular 
branch in the outer cortex is reproduced. Here the cortex 
will be seen to contain a number of curiously wide and 
short tracheids with delicate spiral or reticulate markings, 
resembling very closely the spirally-marked cells which form 
the termination of the finest ramifications of the veins in 
leaves. A characteristic feature of these cortical tracheids 
is the wide interval between two successive turns of the spiral 
thickening. 
These cells are seen in Fig. 2 at (a) on the inner side of the 
outer cortex. At (c) where we obtain a tangential view of 
this portion of the cortex it will be seen that these cells form 
a fairly broad patch. At (b) the cells become narrower in 
diameter and somewhat more closely set, and this is evidently 
the point at which a connexion existed with the vascular 
strand of fine and closely-marked tracheids running out from 
the protoxylem group. This connexion is not observable in 
this section, but I was fortunately able to discover a longi- 
tudinal section in which this connexion was preserved. 
Fig. 5 2 is a drawing made from a section in which we have 
not only the connexion of the spiral tracheids of the cortex 
1 Hick Collection, No. 107. 2 Cash Collection, No. 401. 
