I.—A Study of the Vascular Supply to the Carpels in the Follicle-bearing Ranunculaceæ

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Abstract
In 1790 Goethe (Eng. Trans., 1863) published his doctrine of metamorphosis. Before that only two authors had expressed any fundamental ideas with regard to the flower. Wolff in his Theoria Generationis (1759) said that the plant consisted of nothing but stem and leaf, the root being a modification of the former; parts of the flower were appendages, and the production of floral leaves was due to degeneration of the sap, the richest portion being used up at a lower level by the vigorous first-formed foliage leaves.Linné (1760) expressed the same idea as Wolff, partly basing his evidence on teratological specimens, in which the various floral organs were sometimes found to be replaced by leaves. He further considered the flower to be a modified shoot, five years' growth being compressed into a single year. Believing that the different floral whorls were developed the one from the other, and observing that they encircled each other, he attributed the various floral envelopes to different tissues of the stem—e.g. the bark gave rise to the calyx, and the carpels arose from the pith.