Page:An introduction to physiological and systematical botany (1st edition).djvu/270



examined the general structure and external form of plants, we now come to more important and even essential, though more transitory organs—the flower and fruit, or parts of fructification. By these each species is perpetually renewed without limits, so far at least as the observation of mankind has reached; while, as we have already mentioned, all other modes of propagation are but the extension of an individual, and sooner or later terminate in its total extinction.

Nothing can be more happy than the Linnæan definition of these organs; ''Phil. Bot.'' 52. "The fructification is a temporary part of vegetables, destined for the reproduction of the species, terminating the old individual and beginning the ."