THE STUDY OF PLANTS IN ANCIENT AND MODEEN TIMES. 13 



continual struggle to become earth on the one hand and air on the other, unmixed 

 metal at one end, and dual air at the other. A plant is a radius, which becomes 

 single towards the centre, whilst it divides or unfolds towards the periphery; it is 

 not therefore an entire circle or sphere, but only a segment of one of those figures. 

 The individual animal; on the contrary, constitutes of itself a sphere, and is there- 

 fore equivalent to all plants put together. Animals are entire worlds, satellites or 

 moons, which circle independently round the earth; whereas plants are only equal 

 to a heavenly body in their totality. An animal is an infinitude of plants. A 

 blossom which, when severed from the stem, preserves by its own movement the 

 galvanic process or life, is an animal. An animal is a flower-bubble set free from 

 the earth and living alone in air and water by virtue of its own motion." 



Page after page of the writings on Nature-philosophy of Oken (1810) and 

 other contemporary naturalists is filled with interminable statements of the same 

 kind. At the present day it seems scarcely credible that such propositions were 

 then received with admiration as profound and ingenious utterances, and that they 

 were even adopted as mottoes for botanical and geological treatises. For example, 

 it is worthy of record that as late as the year 1843 the Austrian botanist Unger 

 made use of the last of the flowers of rhetoric above quoted from Oken's Nature- 

 philosophy as a motto for one of his first works on the history of development, 

 the title of which is Plants at the Moment of their becoming Animals. 



The general divisions or systems of the vegetable kingdom which were evolved 

 by adherents of the school of Nature-philosophy were, as may be imagined, just as 

 absurd as the speculations on which they were based. In his Philosophical Systems 

 of Plants Oken develops in the first place the idea that the vegetable kingdom 

 is a single plant taken to pieces. Inasmuch as the ideal highest plant is composed 

 of five organs, there must likewise be five classes: root-plants, stem-plants, leaf- 

 plants, flower-plants, and fruit-plants. The world is fashioned out of the elements: 

 earth, water, air, and fire. Hereupon is founded a classification of root-plants into 

 earth-plants or lichens, water-plants or fungi; air-plants or mosses, and light-plants 

 or ferns. Proceeding from the assumption that all the groups are parallel and that 

 the principle of classification for each group is always given by the one preceding 

 it, we have next, to take one instance, the second class — that of stem-plants — 

 divided (in accordance with the subdivision of earth into earths, salts, bronzes, and 

 ores) into earth-plants or grasses, salt-plants or lilies, bronze-plants or spices, and 

 ore-plants or palms. 



SCIENTIFIC METHOD BASED ON THE HISTORY OF DEVELOPMENT. 



Though as we see the doctrine of metamorphosis, with its conception of a 

 typical plant, degenerated thus into the most barren of fancies, still from it originated 

 the line of research based on the history of development which has since borne 

 fruit in every department of botany. Observers arrived at the conviction that 

 every living plant undergoes a continuous transformation which follows a definite 



