Evolution / by Patrick Geddes and J. Arthur Thomson.

  • Patrick Geddes
Date:
[1911?]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Evolution / by Patrick Geddes and J. Arthur Thomson. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    which the beginner in flower dissection is apt to forget altogether. This, however, may be easily made out as a distinct case, in the butter¬ cup, or best of all, in the magnolia, and the sepals and petals, the stamens and carpels, may all be seen to arise upon this in ascending order, like the young crowded leaves of a vegetative bud. This simple (“ hypogynous,?) arrangement, however, goes farther in the (“ perigynous ”) strawberry, where, instead of a short conical shoot, we have now the axis disk-shaped, recalling the composite head; while even the hollow fig finds its parallel in the many flowers which, like rose or daffodil, have become “ epigynous,” i.e. with their ovaries, now sunk at the bottom of a cup, the arrested and overgrown apex. Passing now to forms so utterly distinct as the fungi, we find the same process repeating itself, the essential reproductive organs sinking from cone to disk, and thence into cup or pouch, like fig and rose, indeed closing up completely. Now, the farther we go in our studies of flower anatomy, the more we find of this subordination of the vegetative life by the reproductive ; witness the reduction of the number of petals, stamens and carpels from indefinite to few. See, however, what all this amounts to. All these changes and
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