53 



the Medusa, and the Coralline is so true and so close, that 

 if the larval Aphis be a distinct individual and not a part, 

 so must be the strobila, the planula, and the gemmiparous 

 leaf: if the succession of larval Aphides produced without 

 the access of the male be truly described, as it always has 

 been described, as a succession of generations, so must that 

 succession of planula, polype and strobila which leads to 

 the oviparous Medusa : and that succession of planulae and 

 nutritive polypes which precede the detachment of the free 

 procreative medusoid polypes in the Coryne, and the like 

 with the plant-generations preceding the flower. 



The Botanist, in fact, arrived earlier than the Zoophy- 

 tologist at an intimate philosophical comprehension of the 

 nature of his composite subjects. After Linnaeus had 

 made known with his characteristic terseness and brevity 

 the phaenomena of the transformation of the leaf into the 

 bract, the sepal or the petal, and the retrograde change of 

 the stamen into the petal, of the petal into the sepal, and 

 of this again into the leaf, in his ' Philosophia Botanica*? 

 and with more detail in the e Prolepsis plantarum^'; and 

 when the great Goethe had gathered together these and 

 other analogous phaenomena in vegetable life, and had 

 combined them harmoniously, with true poetic insight 

 into their essential nature, in his famous doctrine of ' Ve- 

 getable Morphology/ a reconsideration of the nature of 

 the essentially individual plant could hardly fail to suggest 

 itself to the thinking mind. 



* " Principium/onm etfoliorum idem est. 

 Perianthum sit ex connatis foliorum rudimentis. 

 Derivato nutrimento ad squamas amenti, destructis fiosculis, mutantur 



in Folia. 



Derivato nutrimento ad flosculos amenti, fiunt folia Calyces. 

 Luxurians vegetatio folia e floribus continuando producit. 

 Macro, vegetatio flores e foliis terminando producit." Metamorphosis 

 Vegetabilis, Philos. Botan. p. 301. 



\ " Quando flos nascitur abeunt folia gemmacea anni sequentis in 

 bracteas, tertii in calycem, quarti in petala, quinti in stamina, sexti in 

 pistilla, quod a situ judicatur." Amcenitates Academicce, vol. vi. (1789) 

 p. 341. The hypothesis of the succession has long been abandoned. 



