Volume 1

The natural history of plants : their forms, growth, reproduction, and distribution / from the German of Anton Kerner von Marilaun ; translated and edited by F.W. Oliver, with the assistance of Marian Busk and Mary F. Ewart ; with about 2000 original woodcut illustrations and sixteen plates in colours.

  • Kerner von Marilaun, Anton, 1831-1898.
Date:
1897
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The natural history of plants : their forms, growth, reproduction, and distribution / from the German of Anton Kerner von Marilaun ; translated and edited by F.W. Oliver, with the assistance of Marian Busk and Mary F. Ewart ; with about 2000 original woodcut illustrations and sixteen plates in colours. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    Special importance is given to the social life by the fact that the chief species of Phanerogams participating in it are of gregarious growth and cover whole tracts of country, forming boundless heaths and measureless forests, as, for instance, the various heaths, the oak, the beech, the fir, and the poplar. The conception of this subterranean life affecting every moorland and vast timbered tract is one full of wonder and interest. We can now see why it is that the ground in woods is the abode of such a profusion of fungi. No doubt some of these fungi draw their nutriment exclusively from the store of dead plant-organs accumulated there; but others, as certainly, are in social connection with the living roots of green-leaved plants. It is true we cannot yet state precisely what are the species of fungi which contract this sort of union, or whether generally a definite elective affinity exists between certain fungi and certain green-leaved plants. There is much in favour of this supposition in a few cases: but, on the other hand, it is very unlikely that each of the various Phanerogams occupying a limited area of ground in a pine-forest, where a few square meters of earth contain so many tangled roots belonging to pines, spurge laurels, bilberries, cranberries, heath, and winter-green, that they can only be separated with difficulty, should select from the great host of fungi growing in the forest a different partner. In instances of this kind it seems just to suppose that the mycelium of one and the same species of fungus enters simultaneously into connection with all or several of the plants growing close together; it is similarly probable that the mycelia of different species of fungi render to one and the same flowering-plant the service of absorption according to the locality in which it occurs. This surmise is supported by the fact that when certain species, brought from distant parts and regularly exhibiting mycelial mantles on the ends of their roots, are reared in our gardens and greenhouses from seed, they unite in these abodes with fungus-mycelia, which certainly do not exist in the regions where the Phanerogams in question grow wild. Thus, for instance, the roots of the Japanese tree, Sophora Japonica, and those of the Epacridese of Australia, are found in European gardens in social union with fungi, which with us are native, but which certainly do not occur in Japan or Australia; and it is therefore scarcely open to doubt that the Sophora Japonica, to take one example, associates itself with different fungi in different regions. Now that the symbiosis of fungi devoid of chlorophyll with green-leaved Phanerogams has been discussed, we are for the first time in a position to deal with that most remarkable of all cases of food-absorption wherein the subterranean roots of a flowering-plant are completely wrapped in a mycelial mantle, whilst the parts which shoot up above ground bear no green leaves, and, in general, possess no trace of chlorophyll. Such is the case of Monotropa, the various species of which are intimately allied in the structure of flowers and fruit with the Primrose and Winter- gi’een, and are met with scattered everywhere in shady woods. Their stems, which are from 10 to 20 centimeters in height and emerge from the mould of the forest- ground in summer time, are thick, fleshy, succulent, and profusely beset with