Figure 2.

The First Drawing of the Shoot Apical Meristem of a Plant, from the Dissertation of Caspar Friedrich Wolff (1759).

Wolff called the shoot apex the “punctum vegetationis” and was the first person to show that vegetative leaves and the organs of a flower (sepals, petals, stamens, and carpels) all have the same developmental origin from the growing tip of a plant and are homologous as leaves. Note in particular, illustrations 6, 13, 18, and 19 of Wolff (1759) for images of vegetative and floral apical meristems and the primordia that they produce. (Image courtesy of the Countway Library of Medicine of Harvard University.)