Growth Patterns in Vascular Plants

Growth Patterns in Vascular Plants organizes the processes of plant growth into four fundamental categories: primary growth, secondary growth, reproductive growth, and phylogenetic development. In sections devoted to each of these processes, a multidisciplinary panel of experts assembled by editor Muhammad Iqbal surveys the advances made in understanding plant growth in recent decades. Contributors include biochemists, ecophysiologists, molecular biologists, and other specialists, in addition to anatomists and morphologists. Some of the topics covered are root growth and gravitropism, leaf development and the influence of light, growth of laticifers, tracheary elements in parasitic plants, thickening in pteridophytes and monocotyledons, adaptive anatomy of lianas, factors controlling flower, gametophyte, and embryo development, and plant growth and the evolution of seed plants.
The chapters, generously illustrated with photographs and drawings, have been carefully organized to reveal the investigative trends in the various disciplines. The book provides a starting point for further advances in our understanding of plant growth.

A very influential poet and philosopher, Muhammad Iqbal was born in the Punjab, where he received his early education. He also studied philosophy in England and in Germany but returned to India three years later to practice law. Although he noted that European civilization was materially advanced, he also found it hypocritical and lacking in support of true human values. Islam, on the other hand, though somnolent, was at once both truly creative and able to give humanity moral direction. It was this, the true Islam of Muhammad and the Koran, that Iqbal sought to help Muslims recover. As evidenced in his six lectures on The Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam (1928--29), he interpreted the dynamic of Islam in Bergsonian vitalistic terms, as a leading extension of the fully developed self. In line with his attempt to rethink the problems of Islam in terms of modern categories, Iqbal advocated that the solidly Muslim portions of northwest India be given autonomy so that they could be governed in accordance with Islamic ideals, a position that led to the emergence of the state of Pakistan. He was knighted in 1922.