8 



BOTANY AND MORPHOGENESIS 



Edmund W. Sinnott 



No botanist needs to be persuaded that his science is of fundamental im- 

 portance. In some respects it stands above all others, for it deals with the 

 processes that make life possible — photosynthesis and many other basic 

 syntheses. Studies concerned with metabolism, cytology, genetics, ecology, 

 and evolution draw heavily on plant material for their progress. Botany 

 contributes to almost every aspect of the life sciences and will continue to do 

 so actively in the future. 



There is one biological discipline, however, in which all others seem in a 

 sense to converge — the problem of how growth and development are con- 

 trolled and an organism is produced. This in its simplest statement is the 

 problem of jorm in living things, one to which thinkers from Aristotle and 

 Goethe to Joseph Needham and Agnes Arber have pointed as the central one. 

 It is the basis of morphology, a science which Darwin declared to be the 

 very soul of natural history. 



The dynamic aspects of the form problem come to focus in that field of 

 biology that is variously called experimental embryology, causal morphol- 

 ogy, Entwicklungsmechanik , or, perhaps most appropriately, morphogenesis. 

 It deals with the organizing capacity of protoplasm by which random material, 

 when drawn into the body of a plant or animal, becomes organized into a 

 living system with a precise form and structure. The embryo or embryonic 

 center marches on in its development through a regular series of stages to the 

 production of a mature organism and tends to do this even if its normal 

 course is experimentally disturbed. This fact of organization, whatever the 

 explanation of it may turn out to be, still remains the great biological enigma 

 and confers on the sciences of life that autonomy that distinguishes them 

 from the physical sciences. The latter, as Whitehead suggested, may be 

 concerned with "organisms" of a very simple sort, like the atom, but these 

 are far from the elaboration and significance of living ones. 



Plants provide particularly favorable material for morphogenetic investi- 

 ng 



