What is a Flower ? 
! October 
486 
unless all plants have flowers. But if the archegonium of a 
moss and the catkin of the hazel are flowers, we surely want 
another name for the rose and the lily. Yet it is these 
which have the prescriptive right to that name. T he rose 
is a flower to all people and in all tongues. The name has 
been appropriated by botanists to the reproductive organs of 
other plants on the assumption that these were the essential 
objects which it represented, but the popular voice has never 
confirmed the aCt. The child who gathers buttercups and 
daisies with delight repudiates docks and sedges as “ weeds,” 
not “ flowers.” This popular nomenclature is not necessa- 
rily right, but it shows that there is a marked distinction 
which botanists have perhaps not sufficiently regarded. 
2. Plants do not exist for the purpose of reproduction. It 
seems to be very generally assumed that when a plant has 
perfected seed it has accomplished the objeCt of its life : this 
is surely a mistake. Reproduction is a means, not an end ; 
the means by which the continuation of the race is secured 
through generations of perishing individuals. The life of 
the individual is maintained by food, the life of the species 
by reproduction, which means the carrying forward of po- 
tential energy, from generation to generation, with gradual 
accumulation during the development of a species and 
gradual loss during the period of dying out. But as the 
individual does not live for the mere purpose of feeding, so 
the species does not live for the purpose of being reproduced. 
It may be said, rather, that both the individual and the 
species exist because the condition of the ever-moving and 
ever-changing Force — whose movements and changes are 
precisely recorded and represented by the movements and 
changes of Matter — produces, at this epoch, effects of that 
particular kind. Whether that Force be- voluntary or invo- 
luntary, this is the “ final cause ” of all things as far as 
human reason can discover. 
The motions of Force being wave-motions, the life of both 
individual and species is of the nature of a wave, and has 
its gradual accumulation, concentration, and climax, and 
then its gradual decline, dissipation, and extinction. 
Assimilation of food and reproduction are necessary inci- 
dents in this process, but the cause is the existence of the 
Force-wave, and the ultimate end of that wave is the attain- 
ment of its climax, its maximum of concentration and 
unification. 
The climacteric of individuals is attained at various stages, 
according to the position of the individual wave in the great 
specific or ordinal wave. There are Fungi and Algae which 
