Page:Natural History Review (1862).djvu/36

Rh so that no one who has learned even the elements of morphological botany, can help recognising them as leaves, and as the primary and only leaves produced on the evanescent axis.

3. From the two lateral organs spring those third in order, namely, the ovules.

Now it is certainly wonderful, but it is not the less true, that Baillon and Payer, failing to distinguish the second organs (the lateral leaves) from the first, though Baillon's description is sufficiently accurate, have confounded both together, and considered them to be a single organ, called by Payer a flattened form of the peduncle; thus rashly following Schleiden, (who, more than twenty years before fell into the same mistake, of describing the axis and its primordial leaves as a simple axis), and Mirbel, who 46 years before confounded these three very distinct kinds of organs under the common name of peduncle.

Payer further says, that "this flattened form of peduncle does not surprise those who are aware of its existence in the branches of several plants, such as Ruscus, Xylohylla, Phyllocladus, &c." No one, however, but a tyro in morphology, would confound the scale of Pinus resinosa, on whose upper surface, almost in its middle, the growing point rises as the hooked apex of an evanescent axis, utterly distinct both in position and direction, from the morphological apex of the lamina of the proper scale, with the flattened branches of Ruscus, &c., whose withered growing point occupies the very apex of the lamina, and in which no trace oi appendicular organs is found below the growing point.

Baillon, in a somewhat impressive manner observes, after stating some opinions of others on the structure of the flowers of Conifers, that "the new modes of observation afforded by the study of organogeny, may with propriety be applied to the verification of these opinions." M. Ballion may learn, from the mistakes into which he has been led by the employment of a method which he and Payer alone imagine to be new, that the different grades of evolution of an organ, cannot be understood without an accurate knowledge of the nature of the axis and its appendages, and of the relations which exist between them. M. Baillon, however, hardly knows the elements of morphology. How, for instance, does it happen, that, at the present day, he uses the term alternate, which was thus applied a century ago, to describe the arrangement of the bracts of the female flowers of Conifers?

Dr. Lindley, who considers the scales of pine cones to be carpels, (that is, leaves), refers to a cone-like gall of Pinus abies, figured by Richard, which he mistakes for a cone, and in which he regards the scales as being changed into the form of the acicular leaves of Pinus abies. Baillon has been led by Lindley into the same mistake, of regarding this gall as a cone, and only differs from Lindley, so far, that he thinks it is not the scales but the bracts which are changed