1104. This dispersion of the tracheal fasciculi will not easily take place upon the earth's surface, on account of its lesser degree of aerial polarity, but at a certain height. If several stalks emerge from the root, the bush or shrub originates, but if only one, the tree. If the subdivision first commence at a certain distance from the earth, then do Branches originate.
1105. The formation of branches demonstrates in part a great store of tracheal fasciculi, and part by an easy differential capacity in the plant. Both come to the same thing.
1106. Plants devoid of branches are similar or analogous to roots.
1107. The branches again ramify from the same cause by which the stem ramifies. A branch or twig must be regarded as an entire fascicle of tracheæ, which forms superiorly a closed vesicle or bud, that raises the bark, bursts it open into scales and then opens itself. The opening of the external tracheal tubes or vesicle becomes a leaf; a twig can therefore occupy no other position than in the sheath or angle of a leaf. Every succeeding leaf upon the twig is in the same manner a ruptured vesicle of tracheæ. As many leaves therefore originate as there are tracheal zones present.
1108. Every branch is an entire plant. All the tissues and systems are found in it. Tracheæ free themselves from the stalk, pass towards the circumference, break through the bark and carry with them the liber, whose external layer again becomes bark. The branch is only an elongated bud. The stalk is the soil or the root of the branches. Branches, that have been cut off and stuck in the earth, grow. There is nothing contradictory, in the tracheal fascicles of the branch growing downwards into the stalk. A branched tree is a complete wood.
1109. From the same cause, or by the influence of water on different situations in the earth, the root has branches. But as this influence is weaker than that of air and light, so the number, density, and length of the roots is less.
1110. The polarization of the tracheal fascicles into branches takes place all around the stalk in one situation. The influence is equal upon all sides. The idea of the formation of branches is the star. All branches have a radiate position around the stalk—all form a verticillum or whorl.
1111. Every other position of branches is only an alteration of the verticillate arrangement.
1112. In most plants the arrangement of the branches admits of being reduced to the spiral line. This position is only the verticil drawn out.
1113. This drawing out takes place through the continued growth of the stalk, in which the bundles of tracheæ, doubtless by the varied operation of light, develop themselves in order, become individualized, and issue from the stalk as branches.