38 PHILOSOPHICAL NOTES ON 



be sometimes separated into distinct plants, having only one 

 charactered flower. 



Vegetable life might, with a stretch of the imagination, perhaps 

 be conceived, in a vague way, as an everlasting rhizome of a 

 compound nature, growing and varying indefinitely, and throwing 

 up in its course, branches which represent orders, with their 

 genera of all descriptions, and specific subdivisions and variations. 



This supposed rhizome is the cellular basis of all plants, where 

 they meet on a common level. M. J. Berkeley says : — " It must 

 be recollected that in all plants the early embryonic state consists 

 of cellular tissue only." One might add not only the embryonic 

 state, but every other state, for all tissues, whether we call them 

 vascular or woody, vegetative or reproductive, are either made up 

 of cells in their pure and simple primitive form, or of modifications 

 of cells. The beginning and ending of any part, in the living 

 state, whether a root, a stem, a petal, a stamen, a carpel, is a 

 group of cells. 



We see how easy it is, through seed variation, for changes to 

 occur in the different parts of a plant ; and how fixed these changes 

 can become by usefulness and repetition through inheritance for 

 ages. When this fixity is loosened by repeated attacks of cross- 

 fertilization, an infinite number of new combinations of cells and 

 modifications of form in the individual will again become 

 possible. 



The possibilities in the change of organs is exemplified by a 

 Chrysanthemum flower now before me. I see how easy it is for 

 a hair in one generation to be modified into a tooth, a lobe, or a 

 blade in another ; how easy* it is for a ray floret to be changed 

 into the form of a disk floret, and vice versa ; and how many 

 intermediate forms can occur between the regularity of the one, 

 and the irregularity of the other. The ray-florets, from their 

 position, are naturally irregular. They are the circumference 

 florets, and therefore the outer limb of each floret has no crowding 

 to contend with, and to impede its cells growing in that 

 direction. 



* When I say " how easy," I do not mean, of course, that the ease is 

 irrespective of time. This, in the working of the modifying forces of nature, 

 is infinite. 



