420 BOTANICAL GAZETTE [JUNE 
THE CARDINAL PRINCIPLES OF MORPHOLOGY.’ 
ALTHOUGH botany has made remarkable advances in America 
during the past few years, there is still one phase in which it remains 
singularly backward, namely, in its treatment of the morphology of 
the higher plants. There still prevails among us, with little modifica- 
tion, the old formal idealistic morphology, whose founder was Goethe, 
and whose great exponent in this country was Gray; while we give 
scant consideration to the newer natural realistic system, now more or 
less fully accepted elsewhere, and recently given greater extension by 
its leading advocate, Goebel. We have, it is true, some literature of 
the newer morphology, of which an example is Professor Barnes’ dis- 
cussion of the Flower in the Cyclopedia of American Horticulture, while 
the treatment of the homologies of the higher with the lower plants is 
good in most of our recent text-books; but from these there is every 
gradation backward. Happily the newer standpoint is becoming gen- 
erally accessible to American students through the publication of 
Goebel’s Organographie der Pflanzen (Jena, Fischer, 1898-1900), now 
being translated into English under the title Organography of Plants 
(Part I, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1900). In the present paper I 
propose to summarize what seem to me the principles upon which 
the newer morphology is based. 
The difference between the idealistic and the realistic morphology, 
while partly one of fact, is mainly one of point of view. The idealistic 
system is based principally upon comparative anatomy ; it concentrates 
attention upon the steps, or stages, in morphological changes, or meta- 
morphoses, but is largely indifferent as to the processes, or mechanics, 
by which the metamorphoses have been brought about ; metamorphosis 
is therefore to it chiefly a phylogenetic operation, whose exact ontoge- 
netic basis is of secondary consequence. The realistic system, while 
giving great weight to comparative anatomy, lays especial emphasis 
upon the testimony of embryology, particularly seeking the actual onto- 
genetic origin and development, the mechanics, of metamorphoses, only 
through which, it maintains, can. the true nature of metamorphosis be 
understood ; metamorphosis is, therefore, to it primarily an ontogenetic 
process which later and secondarily becomes fixed in the phylogeny. 
The former, the idealistic or phylogenetic systein, predisposes one to _ 
generalized and abstract conceptions, while the latter, the realistic or 
? Read before the Society for Plant Morphology and Physiology, Johns Hopkins 
meeting, December 28, 1900. 

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