No. 508] 



STUDY OF VASCULAR ANATOMY 



237 



I have tried to show above, with all necessary brevity, 

 that the services of anatomy to phylogeny and the doc- 

 trine of descent during the past decade have been neither 

 few nor unimportant. Perhaps the most important gen- 

 eral result of recent work in the modern morphological 

 field, not restricting it, of course, to anatomy, may best 

 be expressed in the words of the eloquent and philosoph- 

 ical apostle to the gentiles, viz., that the things seen are 

 temporal, while the things unseen are eternal. You may 

 think that I have too much emphasized the importance 

 of internal morphology. One example will serve to show 

 that I have not. You are all familiar with that great 

 German work on the morphology (or, as its author prefers 

 to call it, the organography) of the higher plants, which 

 not very long ago appeared in a traduction de luxe from 

 the Oxford University Press. If you scan it from cover 

 to cover, I do not believe you will find a single figure of 

 the fibro-vascular structures. Not even the proverbial 

 halfpenny's worth of bread is present to qualify the 

 oceans of sack. It is not surprising that we should hear 

 from such a source a strong note of morphological pessi- 

 mism. On a recent occasion in our own country, the dis- 

 tinguished author of the work in question compared the 

 task of his science to that of Sysiphus, of classic fable, 

 condemned to roll up the mountainside a stone which 

 continually rebounds. We may confidently expect that 

 the morphology of the future, distrusting the superficial 

 anfracutosities of the steep, will bring the profitless 

 rolling stone to rest in the very heart of the mountain 

 itself. 



