Abstract
THE new volume of the “International Scientific Series” forms a welcome addition to those already published, and it will be read with interest by all who are drawn to a study of the natural history of plants. For although accounts of bud-protection, &c, are to be found scattered through various journals, there existed no connected story of the numberless artifices by which plants shield their winter buds before the appearance of Sir John Lubbock's book. Naturally much of its contents includes matter of common knowledge to those botanists who care for the study of the living plant, but even for them there is much which will be probably found to be novel, and at any rate well worth reading; whilst the freshness and first-hand character of the recorded observations affords a pleasure which those who are acquainted with the author's previous essays in natural history will naturally expect to enjoy from a perusal of the work. It is refreshing to observe that Sir John has not allowed himself to be trammelled too much by orthodoxy—to find that, for example, he declares for the stipular nature of the outgrowths on the petioles of the early leaves of the flowering currant. In the account of the stipules in the genus Tropaeolum, however, there seems to be no mention of the interesting fact that the first two leaves (following on the cotyledons) in the common “nasturtium” are stipulate, whereas these structures are absent from the later developed leaves. Indeed, the whole genus seems worth a more extended treatment from the point of view of stipulation, affording, as it does, almost all transitions from complete development to a complete arrest of stipular formation, and these facts are of especial interest in view of the stipulate character of allied forms.
On Buds and Stipules.
By the Right Hon. Sir John Lubbock With four coloured plates, and 340 figures in the text. Pp. xix + 239. (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner, and Co., Ltd., 1899.)
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F., J. On Buds and Stipules. Nature 60, 149 (1899). https://doi.org/10.1038/060149a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/060149a0