HISTOPHYTA—ACOTYLEDONES.
Devoid of, or without true spiral-vessels, leaves, corollæ, and pistil.
The vegetable kingdom ascends, in accordance with the five main positions of the organs, by five stages; these are again separable into larger groups, which may be called asexual and sexual plants.
1511. The tissues are a something internal, being, as it were, the viscera of plants or their parenchyma, which does not meet the light, and can therefore have no light-organs, which are developed only out of the foliage or leaves. The anatomical systems and organs are tissues that have become external, have attained to air and light, and are hence developed into air-and light-organs. Now, the light-organs are sexual organs. The Tissue-plants can therefore have no sexual organs; and plants divide accordingly into asexual and sexual plants. The asexual are female plants, and are consequently the first or lowest. Thus there can be thus no sexual or male plants, without the female being found that belong to them.
1512. Male or androgynous plants are only possible, if spiral vessels or tracheæ be present. They first, however, originate when the tracheæ become external, or form a circle in the stalk, i. e. are accessible by light; as in the Mono-and Dicotyledones.
1513. The asexual plants are not cryptogamic, but agamic. They do not perform self-impregnation clandestinely, but not at all; for they do not attain light-difference, and consequently not male organs. Analogues of stamina may make their appearance in the mosses, but they invariably fail to attain the development of pollen. What have been called male parts in other cryptogamia, do not merit consideration. Such projections or prefigurations are besides to be found everywhere.
1514. The asexual plants are simply formations of the tissues, of the galvanic vesicle, and are thus of a female nature. They are nothing more than a great utricle full of small vesicles, which by desiccation subdivide into germinal dust or sporules, each granule whereof attracts other mucous vesicles out of the moisture, in order to form again a large utricle.
1515. The asexuals cease in the process of vegetation, where the other plants begin. With the rupture of the gemmal-or bud-vesicle in the higher plants a new world for the first time emerges into view, such as stem, leaves, blossom, and then the ultimate bud ruptures for the first time as the pericarp, and scatters its higher organized germinal powder as true seeds.
1516. An asexual plant is one, which, without all the intermediate organs of the stem, at once represents the capsule or ovary. It consists only of the beginning and end of the plant.
1517. The higher plants differ from the lower by the interposition of new organs between the two terminal organs, namely, the primary vesicle and the true seed. It may be said, that the asexual plant is naught but seed, and that the seed of the higher plants is a fungus upon a leafy peduncle, a fungus more highly organized by light.