Page:History of botany (Sachs; Garnsey).djvu/291

 longitudinal extension of vesicles. He supported Bernhardi's view of the nature of vessels, that the separable spiral threads of spiral vessels are not wound round a membranous tube but are surrounded by one. He maintains against Bernhardi the distinctness of punctated vessels or porous woody tubes from false tracheae or scalariform vessels, while he gave a more correct description of the latter as they occur in Ferns. He rejected Mirbel's view that the pits in dotted vessels are depressions surrounded by a raised glandular edge, and explained them as grains or little spheres. Against this mistake we may set off the very important step which he made in advance, when he not only conjectured that the pitted vessels of the wood are formed from cells previously divided off from one another, but proved by observation that the members composing such vessels are at first actually separated by oblique cross-walls, which afterwards disappear. But this correct observation was impaired by the mistaken idea, which Treviranus shared with his predecessors, that the wood is the result of transformation of the bast, and consequently that the vessels of the wood are bast-fibres, which elongate considerably after they are arranged in a direct chain one after the other ; the unevennesses caused by the oblique junctions of the tissue gradually disappear, the boundaries of each member of a vessel being still for some time indicated by oblique transverse markings. The dividing walls originally existing at these points disappear by widening of the cavities, so that the different parts come to form a continuous canal. To illustrate the disappearance of a parting wall between two adjoining cells Treviranus aptly points, somewhat to our surprise, to the formation of the conjugating tube in Spirogyra. He rejects with Bernhardi the view represented by Sprengel, Link, and Rudolphi, that the different kinds of vessels are formed from true spiral vessels; he says that he had found the scalariform ducts in Ferns so formed in their earliest stage and not as spiral vessels; he thinks it highly probable that the distinct