No. 544] BOTANICAL SOCIETY OF AMERICA 



229 



traordinary diversity of opinion that exists among botan- 

 ists even on the most general questions in the science, it 

 is extremely difficult to ascertain what can be considered 

 a common possession, — an unfortunate condition of things 

 from which no science suffers perhaps so much as 

 Botany." Until comparatively recently these words 

 were as true of plant morphology and plant physiology 

 as when they were written, nearly forty years ago. If 

 there is any mitigation of the situation it is because of 

 the application of chemical and physical laws to the un- 

 derstanding of the functioning of plant structures and 

 the facts of modern paleobotany to the elucidation of the 

 structures themselves. There can be no doubt whatever, 

 that, without the background supplied by our increasing 

 knowledge of fossil plants, the picture painted by the 

 morphologist and embryologist of the evolution of plants 

 is without depth and entirely without perspective. We 

 literally can not see our wood for the countless trees 

 which have crowded into the foreground representing its 

 most modern stage of development. It is certainly im 

 possible to formulate even the rudiments of the evolu- 

 tionary perspective of plants in the absence of paleo- 

 botanical facts as the enduring and fundamental back- 

 ground. 



It is accordingly impossible to deny that in the past 

 morphology has been largely fanciful, where it has de- 

 parted in any way from the bare description of the facts 

 of structure in modern plants, or has attempted to 

 arrange them in accordance with any general or scien- 

 tific principles. True the situation has been relieved not 

 a little, as a result of the study of development and com- 

 parative anatomy, but the difficulty has always been 

 here to decide the direction in which a comparative or 

 developmental series should be read. The indispensable 

 sense of direction can alone be supplied by sighting down 

 the fingerposts of the past, the records of fossil plants, 

 which show us the real path by which evolutionary ad- 

 vancement has been made in any given case. 



