. Lessons with plants. Suggestions for seeing and interpreting some of the common forms of vegetation. is common;and even those plants in which the stamens andpistils are transformed, may develop many morepetals than there are essential organs in the normalflower. This shows again, therefore, that the flower,like the leaf and the branch, isa plastic structure, capable of be-ing greatly modified. 234. Plants which are keptin a very vigorous condition ofgrowth generally bloom compara-tively less than those which aremaking small growth. We have ° ° Fig. 200. already seen (8) that checking „ v, *,
. Lessons with plants. Suggestions for seeing and interpreting some of the common forms of vegetation. is common;and even those plants in which the stamens andpistils are transformed, may develop many morepetals than there are essential organs in the normalflower. This shows again, therefore, that the flower,like the leaf and the branch, isa plastic structure, capable of be-ing greatly modified. 234. Plants which are keptin a very vigorous condition ofgrowth generally bloom compara-tively less than those which aremaking small growth. We have ° ° Fig. 200. already seen (8) that checking „ v, *, • i ., •I ^ o Double-flowermg almond. growth may induce gardener knows that if he would make hisplants bloom profusely he must be careful notto grow them in too large pots, else the growthwill be very great and at the expense of is thus seen to be a most intimate rela-tionship between vegetative growth and iloralgrowth. 235. All these considerations lead us to believethat the parts of flowers and leaves are modifiedforms of one type or kind of plant 206 LUSSOJfS WITH PLANTS 235a. It. is commonly taught that the parts of flowers are modi-fied leaves. This idea seems to have originated with the poet Goethe(.Metamorphoses of Plants, 1790), who supposed that all the struc-tures or members of flowers may have been derived from the has recently been suggested, however, that the evolution mayhave been in the reverse direction,—that leaves may have been de-rived from floral members. It is not necessary to accept eitherhypothesis, for both foliar leaves and floral members may have arisenindependently from a common structure, as from stems; nor is itnecessary to assume that all leaves or all flowers have arisen inthe same sequence. The important lesson for the beginner is thefact that floral members and leaves are essentially alike in originand that, upon occasion, one may pass into the other. Suggestions.—In illustration of a
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Keywords: ., bookauthorbai, bookcentury1900, bookdecade1900, booksubjectbotany
