STRUCTURE OF THE PLANT 31 



when he learns how necessary and well balanced is 

 their mutual interaction, resulting as it does in the 

 general life of the organism, he then begins to realise 

 that his problem is not yet solved, that from behind 

 all the particular questions there emerges the most 

 general of problems, the question of all questions. 

 How have all these wonderful organs combined ? how 

 have all the organisms themselves arrived at that degree 

 of perfection which strikes us so forcibly when we study 

 living Nature ? 



By thus including this general question among those 

 which confront physiology, it is evident that we take 

 our stand among those students of Nature who consider 

 the solution of this question feasible and timely. It is 

 notorious that there have been two schools working in 

 the province of natural science, two parties engaged 

 in warfare. The extremists of the one school saw 

 in living Nature nothing but a collection, a kind of 

 museum, of immutable living things, cast in definite 

 fixed forms. According to them the work of the student 

 of natural science resolved itself into an endeavour to 

 make a general catalogue of those forms, label them and 

 arrange them in a collection. The other school looked 

 upon organic Nature as a vast whole which is ever 

 changing and transforming itself. To-day the organic 

 world is different from what it was yesterday, and 

 to-morrow will be different from what it is to-day. 

 The forms of life at present on our planet have derived 

 greater perfection from less perfect ancestors by means 

 of gradual modifications. This school has Darwin as 

 its head, Darwin who harmonised the whole mass of 

 accumulated evidence and gave strictly definite direction 

 to its hitherto indefinite trend. Obviously the question 

 as to how organs and organisms have originated and 

 perfected themselves cannot exist for exponents of the 

 first-mentioned theory. According to their point of 

 view these organisms have never formed nor developed ; 



