950 LIFE : OUTLINES OF GENERAL BIOLOGY 



tion of anthers than by the (temperamentally vegetative) increasing 

 length of their sustaining filaments; with their fuller exposure to 

 sunlight and its aid in final maturation, as well as to wind, for their 

 diffusion. This offered conception, of the interplay of vegetative and 

 reproductive processes, we have long applied to the evolution of the 

 sexes themselves, with the female as the more anabolic, and the 

 male tending to katabolic preponderance, hence more active, 

 though commonly shorter-lived. Everyone who knows the common 

 dioecious plants, say the ground mercury (Mercurialis perennis) in 

 the shaded dell, or the common red Lychnis often growing beside it, 

 will soon learn to recognise the sexes at a distance beyond that 

 needed for seeing their flowers, since the female plants are the 

 better grown, with longer leaves of fuller green, and often more of 

 them, since with shorter internodes despite their often greater 

 height. The closely allied white Lychnis (L. vespertina) also shows 

 this sex distinctiveness very plainly; but it can be more or less 

 made out in dioecious plants generally. 



Vegetative "Habit" of Growth. — Extending this way of 

 looking at growth, to the evolution of a characteristic vegetative 

 "habit" of growth, we see behind the undenied and undeniably 

 decisive importance, for extinction or survival, of natural selection, 

 the organic normality of variation, and as often at least more clear : 

 in fact as definite, and not merely indefinite. And as organically 

 necessitated and urged; and thus "spontaneous" but in a deeper 

 way than the older one so much left fortuitous; whether as small 

 "variations" or larger "sports" or "mutations", though we are still 

 far from explaining all these. Here it is well to note Darwin's cautious 

 use of "spontaneous" and "indefinite" variations as essentially, for 

 him, from causes not yet explained; so that our difference is more 

 with less cautious Darwinians, who have too often taken these 

 terms for granted, and his doctrine as all-sufficient accordingly. 



Consider now the germinating plant, with its incipient shoot and 

 terminal bud: Have we not here in principle and possibility the 

 latent cabbage, or the palm-tree in miniature ? See the rapid elonga- 

 tion of the tender shoot, with its long internodes, its beginnings of 

 circumnutation ; here in potential development are the climbers, 

 the twiners, the great lianas. In its developing leafage, too, we see 

 the beginning of the exuberance of growth, from grasses and weeds 

 to rapid growing trees. In its developing lateral buds, we see their 

 manifold branchings, whether below ground, as with so many 

 grasses and more, or above it, in the trees. With haste to reproduction 

 and flowering, we have the annuals ; with which we can well imagine 

 terrestrial vegetation began, while in biennials its first survivals of 

 winter — ^thereafter easily prolonged, for in our Mediterranean 

 garden many of our wallflowers are five years old, and with un- 



