Abstract
IN common with other botanists whose student life began in the nineteenth century, I was brought up to believe that, in the flowering plants, an individual vascular bundle might survive after the complete disappearance of the organ which it supplied in some ancestral stage. In my earlier papers I subscribed to this belief; it is only gradually—and, I may say, with reluctance—that I have come to the conclusion that its foundations are insecure. On reading the work of those who still hold to it, one's first impression may well be that it is supported by ample evidence, but on analysis one finds that this impression is due to the fact that the existence of a lost, ancestral organ is postulated whenever, in the writer's view, it is required.
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ARBER, A. [Letters to The Editors]. Nature 132, 823 (1933). https://doi.org/10.1038/132823a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/132823a0
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