Untersuchungen ueber d. Vermehrung d. Laubmoose durch Brutorgane und Stecklinge

Abstract

FEW people perhaps fully realise how abundantly the mosses are provided with modes of vegetative reproduction, even although they may be fully cognisant of the fact that the protonema—the precursor of the mossplant—is readily induced to make its appearance from the cut ends of the stems and leaves of these plants Prof. Correns has done a useful service in bringing together, in a classified manner, the numerous methods employed by mosses to ensure their propagation and dispersal by means less expensive than by the production of spores. The readily friable stems of some species of Andreaea, the easily detached branchlets of Dicranum, are instances, well known to muscologists, of a large class of propagative bodies. These simpler forms of reproduction are also widely spread amongst plants other than mosses, and in some cases—e.g. Lycopodium Selago—the superficial resemblance is rather striking. Less obvious are the subterranean bulbils or buds, such as are met with in Dicranella, Barbula, or Funaria, in which special tuberous bodies are formed. Dicranella heteromalla affords a pretty example of a form transitional from the simple to the more complex types, inasmuch as the subterraneous bulbils of this moss are little more than rows of swollen rhizoid-cells arranged some-what like a string of beads. Many of these bulbils are regarded by Correns rather as of the nature of food reservoirs than as brood bodies; but it is at least certain that they are in most cases able to function in the latter capacity as well as in that of mere storehouses of food-reserves.

Untersuchungen ueber d. Vermehrung d. Laubmoose durch Brutorgane und Stecklinge.

Von Dr. Carl Correns Prof. d. Botanik in Tübingen. Pp. xxiv + 472; mit 187 abbild. (Jena: Verlag v. Gustav Fischer, 1899.)