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FOURTH BOOK. 

 ORGANOLOGY. 



183. ORGANOLOGY embraces the doctrine of the life of the whole 

 plant, and of its particular organs. Life is the activity of those 

 powers inherent in the matter constituting the form of the plant, 

 and which present themselves as the special life of the plant. 



Organology is less understood than any other part of botanical 

 science ; a large field of unexplained phenomena remains, which are 

 comprehended as a whole, because we are too ignorant to separate 

 the individual powers from their combinations, or again to recon- 

 struct them. This unknown region we designate by the term life, 

 or organic life, and its complex cause we term vital power or prin- 

 ciple. But this is only a negative term, and can never be assumed 

 as a ground on which to found future explanations in our science. 



The life of plants is designated, to distinguish it from that of 

 (the higher) animals, as vegetable or vegetative life. This dis- 

 tinction is in the highest degree vague ; it rests chiefly upon the 

 growth and development of forms, and upon the chemical processes 

 of the plant. In these last a certain periodicity is frequently pre- 

 sented to us. The chemical processes proceed very quickly (as in 

 the growth of plants during summer, or the rainy seasons of the 

 tropics), or very slowly, apparently almost standing still (as in the 

 spore and embryo in the winter, or in the dry seasons of the tropics). 



I have previously explained what I understand by life : I must here 

 again refer to it. 



In all times a distinction has been made between animal and vegetable 

 life, but, owing to the paucity of our knowledge, it has hitherto been 

 impossible to draw a direct boundary line between the two. The change 

 of inorganic matter into organic matter, united with the formation and 

 development of new forms, and particularly of new elementary parts, is 

 meant by most writers when they speak of vegetation, vegetable life, &c. 

 That the life of plants embraces much more than these two functions is 

 very evident, but the remaining processes are not so strikingly apparent, 

 and certainly not so evidently dependant upon external influences and 

 physical powers as the two first. We are accustomed to consider plants as 

 lower and less self-dependant organisms than animals, and we attach 

 especial importance to those indications which point to their dependance 

 on physical phenomena (Erdleben *). As the formation of new structures 



* Erdleben is earth-life. Amongst the German writers it is not uncommon to call 

 the sum of physical phenomena presented by the earth a lower kind of life. In a 

 posthumous work by S. T. Coleridge, entitled the " Idea of Life," the same view is 

 adopted TRANSLATOR. 



