110 THE PHENOMENON OF 



sive metamorphosis. The single organs of this graduated 

 elevation, the links of the ascending growth, in which the 

 internal impulse towards an increasingly purer and more 

 victorious representation of its true nature finds its 

 graduated accomplishment, are the leaves. It is a pe- 

 culiarity of vegetable life that it fixes itself at each stage, 

 bringing each to its own permanent and strictly limited 

 development. Hence each leaf is a thing limited and 

 unalterably fixed at a determinate stage of the metamor- 

 phosis. 



Since, then, the plant does not exhaust its life in the 

 single representation, this being rather only a stage beyond 

 which the metamorphosis advances to new representations, 

 some organ must exist serving as the means for this 

 advance, in which the life is not expended in the estab- 

 lishment of the stage, is not terminated in a partial 

 realisation, but which, retaining its independence, secures 

 a future development, rises beyond each representation 

 until the last, as a more active central point, constantly 

 renewed and sending out new radii, and only loses its 

 import as an individual centre of formation when the 

 last and most perfect representation, the aim and con- 

 cluding structure of the metamorphosis, is attained. 

 This organ of the plant is the stem or axis. The 

 stem is not ordinarily continued beyond the last radii, 

 coinciding with the limited or terminal stage. Its 

 terminal prolongation is lost, without any final struc- 

 ture belonging peculiarly to itself, among the last 

 leaves of the sprout, whether this concludes with a 

 flower or not, in the former case, therefore, among 

 the carpels.* But this must not be supposed to mean 



* Among the exceptional cases in which the stem acquires a development 

 rising beyond thelast leaf, or, if it is a lateral sprout, appears in an independent 

 structure devoid of any leaf-formation, becoming itself developed in a radi- 

 ating manner, are : 1, the free central placenta ; 2, emergence into tendril- 

 formation ; 3, emergence into thorn-formation ; 4, emergence into bristle- 

 formation (Setaria, Chenopodmm aristatum) ; 5, the soft needle-like ramifi- 

 cation of Asparagus; 6, the leaf-like summits of the stems and branches of 

 Ruscus, Medeola asparagoides ; and 7, the above-mentioned sterile halm of 



