Morning journal and courier., 1885-01-06
Why do the Leaves Falis

lFrom Paper by Professor Owen
 These withered glories of the summer, their fall in the and yellow state of all- tumn, are symbolic. There are vivid and noisy pleasures; there are those of the quiet kind, and not the less pleasing, even perhaps more cherished in memory when tinctured with some sadness. And in such mood have l watched, on still, calm day in latter autumn, when no breath of wind was stir ring, the leaves settling straight down in si- lent tremulous fall, ''one after one," sug- gesting and recalling the friends and loved ones that had successively passed away in peace. Yet it is not altogether surcease and loss; the leaf-fall better understood may sug- gest brighter associations. The poet, in deed expresses, ill his gifted strain, the com mon thought which associates the pheno1ne- non of the fall of the leaf with the transito- " tenure of all life,-the inevitable course of youth to maturity and deureplt age, of uplifted waving greenness and freshness to the sere and withered return to earth and dust. Ask friend why the leaves fall in autumn. He will answer, ''They fall be cause they die." The phenomena of defoliation are compared by my old friend Loudon with the sloughing of dead parts,- state initiated in the leaf ''by the cold of autumn, and accelerated by the frosts of winter" And such may still be the common notion; it was long my own.
 But some summers ago I was led to think @ little closer into the matter by an effect of thunderstorm which took place in July. The lightning struck a tall elm tree, one branch of which it killed. The leaves te came brown and died; but they did not fall
 When autumn came their bright brethren, fading to a similar tint, fell. When winter frost had set in, and the crisp snow over spread the park like a gigantic bride-cake, the elm was all stripped save that thunder stricken branch and the only leaves that re mained were those that had been killed in midsummer. They were never shed. They routed eff bit by bit. This led me to exam inc the nature of the attachment of some leaves in some trees in my own garden. The expanded base of the petiole, or leaf-stalk, is attached by continuity of woody tissue, including parenchymal cells, sap-vessels, air vessels and the cuticle of the bark continued from the branch into the stalk. The plane and sycamore are good subjects for the ex- animation. Soon a delicate line of the cuti- cle indicates the coming place of separation; soon also in the sycamore, and most of our deciduous trees, a tiny bud peeps from the axil, or angle between the leaf-stalk and stem. Now, next, l may remark that, watching the autumnal period of the fall, 1 observed that defoliation was accelerated not so much by early frost as by unusual warm and open weather in November, and then, especially with the plane-tree, that many of the leaves which naturally fell were not in the ''sere and yellow" state, but were green, as full of life. Even now you may see the difference of color between such leaf shed when living, which I hold in my right hand, and the ordinary withered leaf in my left. My examination at this period led me to per ceive that the immediate cause or stimulus of the fall was the growth of the baby-bud at the base of the leaf-stalk, which, pressing on the tissues of that part, caused their dis integration and disappearance in manner analogous to that of Absorption" in the ami nal economy. Pursuing the examination in different kinds of deciduous trees, I found that the mother-leaf was pushed off in diff ferent ways, and that these represented the different ways in which deciduous teeth are displaced by their successors. Thus, in the plane-tree the bud pushes vertically up the middle of the base of the stalk, while in the sycamore it excavates obliquely the side of the base The shed plane-leaf shows conf cal cavity at the detached part of the petiole, like that at the base of shed tooth of the crocodile; the fallen sycamore-leaf shows an oblique lateral depression, like that at the base of the shed tooth of lizard. In the