2 y8 PLANT AND ORGANIC CHEMISTRY 



The practical application of a theory which advocates that 

 the morphology of a plant is the outcome of its chemistry, will 

 be used by the chemist to direct him to certain plant groups for 

 any compound which experience proves to be present with 

 similar morphological characters in other groups. 



It has been recently suggested * that many of the chemical 

 compounds may serve the plant as means of defense against 

 animals, and when we camphorize our furniture and poison our 

 flower-beds, . we are only imitating and reinventing what the 

 plants practiced before the existence of man; and I may add 

 that the cinchona- trees of malarial countries proclaimed long 

 since their subtle therapeutical skill in securing for themselves 

 a corner in quinine manufacture, independent of contempo- 

 rary sources. 



A full acquaintance with the chemical compounds of living 

 plant orders may even lead to a chemistry of paleo-botany, and 

 where the fossil forms resemble modern groups, as in some of 

 the well-preserved remains lately discovered in France, 2 the 

 same chemical compounds might have existed as are now found 

 in similar groups. From the knowledge which will one day be 

 ours, of the morphology and evolution of chemical substances, 

 a flora may be reconstructed reaching far back into the recesses 

 of time. 



In minerals, plants, and animals the same principles recur, 

 though, at each higher plane, under more complicated condi- 

 tions; and any one who, on visiting the Hot Springs of the 

 Yellowstone National Park, has seen the non-carboniferous 

 gelatinous masses assuming the forms of organized life, will 

 ask himself if silica, under some conditions, may not replace 

 carbon and become living matter. Since Confervas do live in 

 these springs at high temperature, perhaps some such locality 

 as the Yellowstone may have been the birthplace of "a pro- 

 toplasmic primordial atomic globule." 



The impulse which directs minerals to masquerade as living 

 plants and animals often manifests itself, for example, in the 

 ferns called stag-horns; and orchids, disguised like insects, pre- 



1 M. Leo Errera, Royal Bot. Soc. of Belgium, Revise Scien., 2gth Jan., 1887, 



2 M. Louis Crie, Comp. Rend., t. ciii, p. 1143. 



