4 THE LIFE OF THE PLANT 



tion of phenomena common to all the organisms of both 

 kingdoms, the study of the fundamental laws of life. 

 This can and must attract the attention of all thinking 

 men who wish to understand what is going on around 

 them. The same holds true in the inorganic world. 

 Mineralogy, which is a simple description of matter 

 that forms the crust of the earth, certainly cannot 

 excite the same interest as chemistry, which explains 

 phenomena taking place as the result of the reaction of 

 substances, or as geology, which recites the history of 

 our planet. 



There is no doubt therefore that physiology rather 

 than morphology, function rather than structure, and 

 life rather than form, may be expected to attract general 

 attention. Let us now see which of the two tendencies 

 has been the more fully worked out in botany — is it 

 the one which deals with life or the other which con- 

 fines itself to lifeless forms ? 



The history of science shows that botanists have spent 

 nearly all their energies upon the latter kind of work. 

 Men of science have devoted themselves entirely to 

 that extreme of the subject, forgetting the life of which 

 the body is but the vehicle. At no very distant period 

 the great majority of botanists belonged to the first of 

 the types described above, and even to-day not a few 

 may be found ready to repeat the words of a French 

 zoologist who, in the course of an exciting debate in 

 the Paris Academy, prided himself upon the fact that 

 during the whole of his scientific career he had not 

 expressed a single idea, but had only defined and 

 described, described and defined. If we turn from the 

 exponents of such old-fashioned ideas to our con- 

 temporary scholars, we shall find many who may criticise 

 their predecessors and recognise the superiority of the 

 physiological tendency of the present day, but who 

 nevertheless work along the same exclusively morpho- 

 logical lines. According to these modern scientists, a 



