Botany; Geotropism; Plants -- Irritability and movements
Concluding Remarks on the Circumnutation of Stems.—Any one who will
inspect the diagrams now given, and will bear in mind the widely
separated position of the plants described in the series,—remembering
that we have good grounds for the belief that the hypocotyls and
epicotyls of all seedlings circumnutate,—not forgetting the number of
plants distributed in the most distinct families which climb by a
similar movement,—will probably admit that the growing stems of all
plants, if carefully observed, would be found to circumnutate to a
greater or less extent. When we treat of the sleep and other movements
of plants, many other cases of circumnutating stems will be
incidentally given. In looking at the diagrams, we should remember that
the stems were always growing, so that in each case the circumnutating
apex as it rose will have described a spire of some kind. The dots were
made on the glasses generally at intervals of an hour, or hour and a
half, and were then joined by straight lines. If they had been made at
intervals of 2 or 3 minutes, the lines would have been more
curvilinear, as in the case of the tracks left on the smoked
glass-plates by the tips of the circumnutating radicles of seedling
plants. The diagrams generally approach in form to a succession of more
or less irregular ellipses or ovals, with their longer axes directed to
different points of the compass during the same day or on succeeding
days. The stems
therefore, sooner or later, bend to all sides; but after a stem has
bent in any one direction, it commonly bends back at first in nearly,
though not quite, the opposite direction; and this gives the tendency
to the formation of ellipses, which are generally narrow, but not so
narrow as those described by stolons and leaves. On the other hand, the
figures sometimes approach in shape to circles. Whatever the figure may
be, the course pursued is often interrupted by zigzags, small
triangles, loops, or ellipses. A stem may describe a single large
ellipse one day, and two on the next. With different plants the
complexity, rate, and amount of movement differ much. The stems, for
instance, of Iberis and Azalea described only a single large ellipse in
24 h.; whereas those of the Deutzia made four or five deep zigzags or
narrow ellipses in 11½ h., and those of the Trifolium three triangular
or quadrilateral figures in 7 h.
CIRCUMNUTATION OF STOLONS OR RUNNERS.
Stolons consist of much elongated, flexible branches, which run along
the surface of the ground and form roots at a distance from the
parent-plant. They are therefore of the same homological nature as
stems; and the three following cases may be added to the twenty
previously given cases.
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