...that shoot; and this happens because the nourishment that passes through that diameter, which used to pass there to rise up and nourish the branches of the same year, not finding them, stops to nourish the branch that is born at the end of the bark and cambium. But this rule seems to suffer an exception, because if all the branches this plant would generate that year from all its nourishment made up such a quantity of branches that, recomposed and united together with their thicknesses, they reassembled a thickness equal to the cut branch — then, if the whole front of the bark and cambium of the cut plant were to reassemble, along the entire lips of its cut, a united circle of one continuous branch embracing the whole circumference of the wood, it would remake that same year as great a thickness of wood as is the thickness of the branch it embraces; which seems impossible, even though the air, rain, and dew should help it. For much greater is the circumference of all the outermost branchings joined together — which the plant, not being cut, was to generate that year — than is the circumference spread over the whole front of the cut bark; and consequently it draws more nourishment, because in that bark and cambium lies the life of the plant. But the end of these matters will not be treated in this place, because it is reserved for elsewhere, and does not pertain to painting.

[839] On the proportion of the branches with the proportion of their nourishment.

All the branchings of one and the same [plant] have such a proportion...