Origins of Mendelism / Robert C. Olby, with an introduction by Professor C. D. Darlington.

  • Olby, Robert C. (Robert Cecil), 1933-
Date:
1966
Catalogue details

Licence: Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0)

Credit: Origins of Mendelism / Robert C. Olby, with an introduction by Professor C. D. Darlington. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    Appendix 163 this type of research and will provide us with some light on an equally remarkable product. The extremity of the stigma of Vortulaca olerácea is covered with very slender transparent hairs, filled with corpuscles of the sap, and I thought it would be interest¬ ing to find out if these hairs happened to show any move¬ ment in their interior. In fact I was able to satisfy myself that the corpuscles passed from the base of the hairs to the summit, from whence, returning to the base, they began the same circuit again, although rather slowly. Repeating this examination several times, I happened to notice a hair to the tip of which a pollen grain was attached. After a little while this grain suddenly burst, ejecting a sort of gut {boyau) which was fairly transparent and after extending to the ñül length of the hair it ap¬ peared to unite laterally with it. Continuing my observa¬ tion of this new organ which had just appeared, I found that it consisted of a simple tube made of a very delicate membrane, and I was greatly astonished to see that it was filled with little bodies of which one part came out of the pollen grain [into the tube] and the other went back into the grain after having described a circuit of the tube or gut. Amici, G. В. 1824. Observationes sur diverses espèces de plantes. Ann. Sci. Nat. sér i, 2, 65-67. (Trans, of his paper of 1823 in: Memorie di matematica e di Fisica della Società Italiana della Scienza, residente in Modena, 72, 234-286.) Amici: on the Growth of the Vollen Tube The tubes penetrate into the stigma; of all the facts that one can ascertain for a great number of plants, this is the most certain. But does the prolific Hquor diffuse through the interstices of the conducting tissue in order to be carried to the embryo, as M. Brongniart has seen and drawn it? No; the phenomenon is clearly even more