298 MORPHOLOGY. 



Link says : " Flower is a bud altered through metamorphosis : it be- 

 longs to the terminal parts, and is known by the stamens and pistils." 

 How Link will by this means distinguish the inflorescence of the Aracece, 

 of the Composite, &c. from a flower, I do not see ; both are metamor- 

 phosed terminal buds, with stamens and pistils ; no investigation can 

 establish that the bud is a compound one in the former, which, indeed, 

 is not set up by Link ; for every leaf-bud, for instance, in the Lime, 

 has lateral buds ; and the greater or smaller development of lateral buds 

 cannot at all come into consideration in a metamorphosed bud. 



Lindley calls the flower a terminal bud which encloses the propaga- 

 ting organs, and the foregoing objection is so much the more applicable 

 to his definition. 



A. Richard says, " The flower is essentially constituted by the pre- 

 sence of one of the sexual organs, or of both sexual organs united on a 

 common organic receptacle ; they may, or may not, be furnished with a 

 definite envelope to protect them." This suits so excellently the cones of 

 the Coniferce and the spadix of true Aroidece, that Richard cannot truly 

 deduce from his definition of the flower why, by his rule, those are 

 inflorescences and these flowers. 



These examples are sufficient to make good the reproof, that hitherto 

 Botany has never raised the question how the flower is distinguished 

 from the inflorescence, and yet the answer to this question is indis- 

 pensable. 



The language of common life, starting from the unprejudiced impres- 

 sion, calls the spadix, with its spathe, the flower of the Aracece : it speaks 

 of the flower of the Clover, and means the entire head ; it says the Corn- 

 flower, and applies this name to the whole capitulum of Centauria. The 

 simple impression is at first always right ; and if science, in opposition to 

 it, calls those flowers not flowers but inflorescences, it must prove this 

 against the simple impression. This may, of course, be done satisfacto- 

 rily, but has hitherto been altogether neglected. Link* even sought to 

 defend the popular term in the Composites, against Cassini ; when he says, 

 however, that the people appear to have had a better knowledge of the 

 essential of the inflorescence of the Composites than Cassini, it is indeed 

 merely a jest. The people call the thing a flower for the very reason 

 that they have no knowledge at all of what is essential in the matter, 

 but refer merely to the impression of first sight. An obscure presenti- 

 ment of something true does, indeed, lie in this unprejudiced percep- 

 tion, as in the natural piety of the clown is indicated, even though in 

 obscure features, the Divine faith resting deep in the human spirit ; but 

 he who would endeavour to develope a philosophy of religion with the 

 limited insight and confused conceptions of a clown, would arrive merely 

 at confined and obscure mysticism. Science, in order to gain a distinct 

 consciousness of that which lies dark and hidden in impression and feel- 

 ing, requires scientific instruments, accurate abstractions, definite con- 

 ceptions, &c. Undoubtedly there lies in that complication of single 

 flowers into that which gives us the impression of a whole, with definite 

 limitation in the Composite, &c, something which marks it as a higher 

 morphological stage of development of Phanerogamic plants; and it is 

 just this new combination of isolated parts into a collective form of a 

 higher order which the unprejudiced popular sense at once compre- 

 hends. But these forms do not thereby stand nearer to the solitary 

 flower than to the inflorescence, as Link supposesf, but are, on the con- 



* Elem. Phil. Bot. ed. 2. vol. ii. p. 78. 



f This would be the same as saying 10OO stands nearer to 1 than to 999. 



