70 GENERAL MORPHOLOGY. [BOOK i. 



have no knowledge at present of such an economy obtaining 

 in other plants except Taxads and Jointfirs (Gnetacese) as a 

 constant character. It does, however, happen, as the same 

 observer has pointed out, that in particular species the ovaiy 

 is ruptured at an early period by the ovules, which thus, when 

 ripe, become truly naked seeds : remarkable instances of 

 which occur in Ophiopogon spicatus, Leontice thalictroides, 

 and Peliosanthes Teta. The seeds are almost uncovered after 

 the ovary begins to swell, in Reseda; and in the common 

 Vine the grapes are occasionally ruptured, allowing their 

 seeds to protrude and ripen. 



17. The Comparative Anatomy, or Morphology of the Floral 

 Organs in Flowering Plants. 



From what has been said in the preceding pages it will 

 have become obvious that the flower, and all the parts that 

 belong to it, are in reality collections of organs originally the 

 same in nature a the leaf, arranged upon the same plan, and 

 modified according to the different purposes they are to serve. 

 This being so, the apparently complicated apparatus of a 

 flower is in reality an arrangement of the simplest kind ; and 

 the infinite diversity observable in the blossoms of plants is 

 explicable upon a few general principles, 



Zuccarini has well observed that we should never lose sight 

 of the great fact, that in Nature there is a paucity in the 

 number of forces, but a prodigious variety in their adaptation 

 to the same object. In no department of the organic world is 

 this more manifest than in the Vegetable Kingdom ; so that 

 the difficulty we now experience is not how these things should 

 be, but how it has happened that they were so long unseen. 



The earliest philosophers who adopted what are now called 

 Morphological views, reasoned a priori, generalising from an 

 exceedingly small supply of facts. Nevertheless, their views 

 have been proved to be correct, by the unerring testimony of 

 progressive development. This is sufficiently proved by the 

 following very instructive cases : 



A. The progressive development of Mallow-ivorts (Malvaceae), 



