34 MORPHOLOGICAL DEVELOPMENT. 



eiice only, that the leaves which are merely placed in close 

 contact in the calyx, are here united together ; ' a view which 

 he corroborates by referring to the manner in which many 

 capsules open and separate ' into their leaves.' The seeds, too, 

 he looks upon as consisting of leaves in close combination. His 

 reasons for considering the petals and stamens as homologous 

 with leaves, are based upon the same facts as those which led 

 Linnaeus, and, many years afterwards, Goethe, to the same 

 conclusion. * In a word,' says Wolfi', ' we see nothing in 

 the whole plant, whose parts at first sight differ so remark- 

 ably from each other, but leaves and • stem, to which latter 

 the root is referrible.' " It appears that Wolff, too, enunci- 

 ated the now-accepted interpretation of compound fruits : 

 basing it on the same evidence as that since assigned. In 

 the essay of Goethe, published thirty years after, these rela- 

 tions among the parts of flowering plants were traced out in 

 greater detail, but not in so radical a way ; for Goethe did 

 not, as did Wolff, verify his hj^pothesis by dissecting buds in 

 their early stages of development. Goethe appears to have 

 arrived at his conclusions independently. But that they were 

 original with him, and that he gave a more variously- illus- 

 trated exposition of them than had been given by Wolff, 

 does not entitle him to anything bej^ond a secondary place, 

 among those who have established this important generaliza- 

 tion. 



Were it not that these pages may be read by some to 

 whom Biology, in all its divisions, is a new subject of study, it 

 would be needless to name the evidence on which this now- 

 familiar generalization rests. For the information of such 

 it will suffice to say, that the fundamental kinship existing 

 among all the foliar organs of a flowering plant, is shown by 

 the transitional forms which ma}^ be traced between them, 

 and by the occasional assumption of one another's forms. 

 " Floral leaves, or bracts, are frequently only to be distin- 

 guished from ordinary leaves by their position at the base of 

 the flower ; at ether times the bracts gradually assume more 



