Publisher's Synopsis
Excerpt from How Ferns Grow
Innumerable books have been written about ferns in their mature stages of development, and many accounts exist of their earliest stages, which end with the formation of the young fern plant, but very little respecting the intervening stages seems to have been recorded. Although in these stages the fern-plant's development takes place, including the leaf-development, the literature of the subject consists of a few scattered papers only. These papers, moreover, deal mostly with individual species, and chiefly with the subject of cell-growth and kindred phenomena. They scarcely touch upon the development of the form and ve nation of the leaf in each species, and in its individual aspect only, without reference to its relation to such development in other fern species. For these reasons, and in view of the important part that the form and venation of the species' leaf play nowadays in the classification of fern species, and of the fact that both often differ widely in the early stages of the' leaf from their characters in the later, it is thought that to point out in this book the principal features of the development of form and venation in fern leaves, as seen in the species of the northeastern United States, will be useful, and may serve to throw light upon such development in fern species in general. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.
