94 THE MORPHOLOGY 



by continually greater combinations and complications, to 

 the most complex plants, which we are compelled to look 

 upon as the highest states, although the uninitiated may 

 think it strange when I name as a representative of this 

 highest expression of vegetable development, the little, 

 common, and therefore despised, Daisy. 



The forms immediately following the above-mentioned 

 simplest plants, also consist of a simple cell, but this is 

 elongated into a filament and often branched, thus ex- 

 hibiting a higher development of form ; next the cells 

 arrange themselves into lines in manifold ways ; a variety 

 of forms of vegetation soon grows up, which in water 

 appear as the Silk-weeds or Confervas, generally of a green 

 colour, or on decaying organic bodies, as Moulds, in very 

 various and often most elegant forms, with the most bril- 

 liant play of colour. Then the cells unite to compose flat 

 structures, known to Botanists by the name of Ulvas, and 

 frequently growing in the sea, almost like young Lettuce 

 leaves, sometimes green, sometimes red, often afford a 

 meagre meal to the poor inhabitants of the coast. Next 

 they crowd together into solid masses, forming clumps and 

 balls of the greatest possible variety of shapes. Now 

 commences an unfolding of richer and more varied forms 

 which were possible before in the simple element; but 

 the differences of development in length and breadth, 

 or length, breadth and depth, are especially frequently 

 repeated in the lower stages of the Vegetable World in the 

 individual groups, and in the higher stages in almost all 

 the individual organs. 



It will be in place here to call attention to a peculiar 

 condition of plants, which in the animal world either does 

 not occur at all, or in a much less striking degree, and then 

 only in those parts which, even without it, allow the draw- 



