Clifton College Scieniifie Society. 



45 



be some thread which will serve as a due in nur search after the order 

 which we know must be hidden behind this glorious exuberance of 

 varied forms. 



Long had botanists and physiologists searched in vain for the clue ; 

 but the discovery of it was reserved ior one— not a laborious experi- 

 menter or deep reasoner, not a mathematician or physiologist, not 

 even a botanist — it was John Wolfgang Goethe, the most brilliant 

 poet of the century, the man whose poetical theoiy of light and 

 colour — beautiful as it was — was an entire failure ; who, by what we 

 must call " instinct," hit upon that principle which I hope to explain 

 to you to-night. 



Goethe himself has left us in his poems a record of what were his 

 own feelings with regard to the " necessity " of the existence of such 

 a principle. 



" Tliou art perplexed my beloved with the thousand-fold endless confusion 

 Of the luxuriant wealth which in thy garden is spread ; 

 Name upon name thou hearest, and in thy dissatisfied hearing, 

 "With a barbarian clang one drives another along, 

 All the forms resemble, yet none is the same as another ; 

 Thus the whole of the throng ijoints to a deep hidden law, 

 Points to a sacred riddle. Oh ! could I to thee my beloved one. 

 Whisper the fortunate word by which the riddle is read ! " 



If you take any common plant, 

 you find the leaves either opposite 

 to each other, or else airanged in 

 a spiral up the stem. We often 

 find many leaves opposite to each 

 other, as in the common cleaver, and 

 such an arrangement is called a 

 whorl. In the flowers, too, of most 

 plants, we find an arrangement in 

 whorls. In a wild rose, an apple- 

 blossom, or a mallow flower, we 

 have a whorl of green sepals, then a 

 coloured whorl of petals, then one 

 or more whorls of stamens, and 

 finally a whorl of pistils or ova- 

 ries. Outside the whole of these 

 whorls we find, in some flowers, 

 such as the thistle or scabious, a 

 a coveiing of scaly leaf-like api^end- 

 ages called bracts. Now Goethe's 

 idea is, that all these difi^erent parts 

 of the flower, each performing such 

 special functions, are in reality 

 metamorphosed leaves brought 

 together by the shortening of the 

 axis, and modified in foi'm in order 

 to jilay the pare n.-quired of them in 

 the propagation of the plant. 



