90 THE MORPHOLOGY 



thickly-crowded spike ; called forth through wonderful 

 metamorphoses, originates in each the germ of a new life, 

 and while this, with its envelopes, becomes perfected into 

 a seed, constant changes in the plant, from below upwards, 

 are in progress ; one leaf after another dies and withers, at 

 last but the dry and naked straw-halm stands there ; bowed 

 down by the burden of the golden-gift of Ceres, it breaks 

 up and rots upon the earth, while within the scattered 

 grain, lightly and snugly covered by protecting snow, a 

 new period of development is preparing, which beginning 

 in the following Spring, continues on the unceasing 

 repetition of these processes. Here there is nothing firm, 

 nothing consistent; an endless becoming and unfolding, 

 and a continual death and destruction, side by side and 

 intergrafted such is the plant ! It has a history, not 

 only of its formation, but also of its existence, not merely 

 of its origin, but of its persistence. We speak of plants ; 

 where are they ? When is a plant perfect, complete, so 

 that I may snatch it out of the continual change of matter 

 and form, and examine it as a thing become ? We speak of 

 shapes and forms ; when shall we grasp them, disappearing, 

 Proteus-like, every moment, and transformed beneath our 

 hands? As in Dobler's dissolving views, one picture 

 imperceptibly disappears before our eyes and another takes 

 its place, without one being able to determine the moment 

 when the former was lost or the latter began to appear. 

 In every given moment is the plant the ruin of the past, 

 and yet, at the same time, the potentially and actually 

 developing germ of the future ; still more, it also appears 

 a perfect, complete and finished product for the present. 

 Here lies the fundamental cause why a morphology of the 

 crystal or the inorganic world must have so essentially 

 different an import and development from the study of the 



