Thus if the body absorbed half the incident radiation its absorptive power would be 2, and if it absorbed all the incident radiation its absorptive power would be r.
Epiphytic plants and desert plants) have absorptive hairs or scales on the leaf epidermis through which rain and dew can be absorbed.
In the more highly developed series, the mosses, this last division of labor takes the form of the differentiation of special assimilative organs, the leaves, commonly with a midrib containing elongated cells for the ready removal of the products of assimilation; and in the typical forms with a localized absorptive region, a well-developed hydrom in the axis of the plant, as well as similar hydrom strands in the leaf-midribs, are constantly met with.
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If the axis of such a sporogonium were prolonged downwards into the soil to form a fixing and absorptive root, the whole structure would become a physiologically independent plant, exhibiting in many though by no means all respects the leading features of the sporophyte or ordinary vegetative and spore-bearing individual in Ptericlophytes and Phanerogams. These facts, among others, have led to the theory, plausible in some respects, of the origin of this sporophyte by descent from an Anthoceros-like sporogonium (see PTERIDOPHYTA).
The formation of a massive body naturally involves the localization of the absorptive region, and the function of absorption (which in the simpler forms is carried out by the whole of the vegetative part of the mycelium penetrating a solid or immersed in a liquid substratum) is subserved by the outgrowth of the hyphae of the surface-layer of that region into rhizoids, which, like those of the Algae living on soil, resemble the root-hairs of the higher plants.
The mid-gut is essentially the digestive and absorptive region of the alimentary canal, and its surface is, in most cases, increased by pouch-like or tubular outgrowths which not only serve as glands for the secretion of the digestive juices, but may also become filled by the more fluid portion of the partially digested food and facilitate its absorption.
The rootlets, which branched by dichotomy, contain a slender monarch stele exactly like that in the roots of Isoetes and some Selaginellae at the present day; they possessed, however, a complex absorptive apparatus, consisting of lateral strands of xylem, connecting the stele with tracheal plates in the outer cortex.
The root differs from the shoot in the characters of its surface tissues, in the absence of the green assimilative pigment chlorophyll, in the arrangement of its vascular system and in the mode of growth at the apex, all features which are in direct relation to its normally subterranean life and its fixative and absorptive functions.
It is the result of the too great intensity of the light incident upon the retina, and which in normal eyeballs is adequately diminished by the absorptive power of the pigmentary material.
He definitely established the absorptive power of clear aqueous vapour - a point of great meteorological significance.