THE FUNDAMENTAL PROBLEMS OF PRESENT-DAY PLANT 



MORPHOLOGY 1 



BY KARL F. GOEBEL 

 (Translated from the German by Professor Francis E. Lloyd, Columbia University) 



[Karl F. Goebel, Professor of Botany, University of Munich, since 1891; Con- 

 servator of Botanical Gardens and of the Institute of Vegetable Physiology. 

 b. Belligheim, May 8, 1855. D.S. Strassburg, 1877; Assistant to Julius Sachs, 

 1878-81; Privat-docent, Wiirzburg and Leipzig, 1880-81; Special Professor, 

 Strassburg and Rostock, 1881-82; Regular Professor, Rostock and Munich, 

 1883-87. Member of the Royal Academy of Science, Munich; Royal Associa- 

 tion of Sciences, Gottingen; Linnean Society, London; Edinburgh Botanical 

 Society; and numerous other scientific and learned societies. Author of Char- 

 acteristic Features of Systematic and Special Plant Morphology; Comparative 

 Study of the Laws of Development of Plant Organs; Descriptions of Plant Biology; 

 Organography of Plants.] 



A FEW months ago I was in Jena in order to attend the unveiling 

 of the statue there erected to M. Schleiden. Now there is hardly 

 any other place which has been of so much significance in the develop- 

 ment of plant morphology as this small university town. It was there 

 that Goethe, the originator of the term " morphology," busied him- 

 self with morphological studies, and founded the idealistic system 

 which has influenced our thought often unsuspectedly till the 

 present day. There Schleiden, in outspoken opposition to the con- 

 ceptions of the idealistic morphology, gave new life to the theory of 

 development founded by Caspar Frederick Wolff in the neighboring 

 town of Halle in the middle of the eighteenth century, and so paved 

 the way for the brilliant discoveries of William Hofmeister. And 

 who does not know what meaning Jena has won as the citadel of 

 phylogenetic morphology, first through the work of Haeckel in 

 zoology and later through that of Strasburger in botany? In such a 

 morphological atmosphere the question forces itself upon us, in what 

 relation do the morphological questions of the present stand to those 

 of the past? Are they still unchanged in spite of the immense increase 

 of empirical material, and have the methods of their solution only 

 changed? Or have the problems themselves become different? 



To reply to this question is not easy, and the answer must vary 

 with the point of view of the one who makes it. For morphology is 

 yet far from being an exact science, the results of which force them- 

 selves upon us with the compulsion of necessity. This is due to the 

 difficulty of the materials, a difficulty which compels us to seek for 

 hypotheses and other subjective means of explanation. It thus comes 



1 The views set forth in this lecture are presented at length in the author's 

 Organography of Plants, Jena, 1898-1901, English translation, Oxford, i, 1900; 

 n, 1905. Concerning the historical significance of Goethe, Schleiden, Hofmeister, 

 compare Sachs' History of Botany, translation, Oxford, 1890. 



