PLANT-LIFE FORMATION. 03 



portion of the body does its own digesting. 

 Everywhere- the Plant excretes, which is 

 known as its transpiration. A developed 

 single organ of heart or of lungs it has not, 

 yet it has circulation at every point and res- 

 piration also, though the latter be special- 

 ized in the leaves. It is evident that Plant- 

 Organism as a whole has not yet subordinated 

 its Parts, each of which insists in a manner 

 upon being the Whole, and performing the 

 functions of the same. Though an organism 

 it has not yet differentiated itself into co- 

 operant organs, with their division of labor, 

 and their subsumption under a common con- 

 trol. Comparatively speaking, the Plant is 

 multicentral while the animal as typical is 

 unicentral. Of course the lower animals in 

 this characteristic approach the Plant. 

 Doubtless the best criterion of the grade of 

 the vegetal Organism would be this inner sub- 

 ordination of the parts to the whole. 



Goethe's statement of the foregoing fact 

 (in his Morphology} has by no means become 

 antiquated in our present knowledge: "The 

 less perfect the organism is, the more similar 

 its parts are to one another, and the more 

 they resemble the whole organism. The more 

 perfect the organism, the more dissimilar its 

 parts to one another and to the whole or- 

 ganism." Now it is the Plant whose organs, 



