[Footnote: Read at a meeting of the Chemists' Assistants' Association.
December 16, 1885.]
By C.E. STUART, B.Sc.
In two previous papers read before this Association I have tried to
condense into as small a space as I could the processes of the nutrition
and of the growth of plants; in the present paper I want to set before
you the broad lines of the methods by which plants are reproduced.
Although in the great trees of the conifers and the dicotyledons we have
apparently provision for growth for any number of years, or even
centuries, yet accident or decay, or one of the many ills that plants
are heirs to, will sooner or later put an end to the life of every
individual plant.
Hence the most important act of a plant--not for itself perhaps, but for
its race--is the act by which it, as we say, "reproduces itself," that
is, the act which results in the giving of life to a second individual
of the same form, structure, and nature as the original plant.
The methods by which it is secured that the second generation of the
plant shall be as well or even better fitted for the struggle of life
than the parent generation are so numerous and complicated that I cannot
in this paper do more than allude to them; they are most completely seen
in cross fertilization, and the adaptation of plant structures to that
end.
What I want to point out at present are the principles and not so much
the details of reproduction, and I wish you to notice, as I proceed,
what is true not only of reproduction in plants but also of all
processes in nature, namely, the paucity of typical methods of attaining
the given end, and the multiplicity of special variation from those
typical methods. When we see the wonderfully varied forms of plant life,
and yet learn that, so to speak, each edifice is built with the same
kind of brick, called a cell, modified in form and function; when we see
the smallest and simplest equally with the largest and most complicated
plant increasing in size subject to the laws of growth by
intussusception and cell division, which are universal in the organic
world; we should not be surprised if all the methods by which plants are
reproduced can be reduced to a very small number of types.