250 CONTRIBUTIONS To
mony in compound words, where perhaps, at the most, only some unessential part of its signification suits.
Thus 2. Meyer, for example (Linneæ, vol. vii, p. 454), after repeating the well-known experiments of Duhamel, lays down this position: “the law of the longitudinal growth of the internodes is to grow in a direction from above downwards.” He requires this position for his theory, and must consequently defend it in every way, although he himself confesses that this reversed growth must appear paradoxical to every one of his readers. He would never have arrived at this position if he had more accurately analysed the word “grow” (with which animal physiology had rendered him familiar), with reference to its applicability to the plant; he would soon have discovered that the generation of new cells, and so far the actual growth of the plant, constantly takes place in its outermost portions in an upward direction, and that his very simile of the building up a voltaic pile is exceedingly well adapted to refute himself. The experiments of Duhamel and Meyer would have no further result than to show that the inferior, that is, the earliest generated, older cells of the internode possess a greater capability to extend in the longitudinal direction, and retain this power longer than the younger cells.
We have an excellent illustration of the second point in the proposition so frequently expressed of late, that the stem of the plant is composed of the coalesced petioles. The word “coalesce” (verwachsen, to grow together) has possessed, how- ever, from time immemorial, both in ordinary life and in science, the signification that two or more originally and naturally separate parts have become by the process of growth either abnormally or, under certain circumstances, normally united. If therefore the word “coalesce” be applied to the stem of the plant, an organ, which, in every period of its existence, under all forms of its appearance, is a simple and undivided one, and at the origin of the plant even constantly appears earlier than the leaves with their petioles, it certainly involves a mischievous abuse of language, by which science itself can gain nothing, and will even lose in the estimation of the intelligent non-professional man, who sees through such a play upon words. What would the zoologist say were we to regard the trunk as a coalescence of the extremities.
