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Show ANNOTATIONS AND ADDITIONS. 369 of Aristotle (Probl. 20, 7) that the production of seed is the ultimate object of the existence and life of the plant. Since Caspar Fried. Wolf (Theoria Generationis, §§ 5-9), and since our great (German) Poet, the process of development in the organs of fructification has become the morphological foundation of all systematic botany. That study, and the study of the physiognomy of plants, I here repeat, proceed from two different points of view: the first from agreement in the inflorescence or in the delicate organs of reproduction; the second from the form of the parts which constitute the axes (i.e. the stems and branches), and the shape of the leaves, dependent principally on the distribution of the vascular fascicles. As, then, the axles and appendicular organs predominate by their volume and mass, they determine and strengthen the impression which we receive; they individualize the physiognomic character of the vegetable form and that of the landscape, or of the regi~n in which any of the more strongly-marked and distinguished types severally occur. The law is here given by agreement and affinity in the marks taken from the vegetative, i. e. the nutritive organs. In all European colonies, the inhabitants have taken occasion, from resemblances of physiognomy (of "habitus," "facies''), to bestow the names of European forms upon tropical plants or trees bearing very different flowers and fruits from those from which the names were originally taken. Everywhere, in both hemispheres, northern settlers have thought they found Alders, Poplars, Apple and Olivetrees. They have been misled, in most cases, by the form of the leaves and the direction of the branches. The illusion has been favored by the cherished remembrance of the trees and plants of home, and thus European names have been handed down from generation to generation; and in the slave colonies there have been added to them denominations derived from Negro languages. The contrast so often presented between a striking agreement of physiognomy and the greatest diversity in the inflorescence and fructification-between the external aspect as determined by the appendicular or leaf-system, and the reproductive organs on which the groups of the natural systems of botany are founded-is a remarkable and surprising phenomenon. We should have been in- |