278 PLANT AND ORGANIC CHEMISTRY 
The practical application of a theory which advocates that 
the morphology of a plant is the outcome of its chemistry, will 
be used by the chemist to direct him to certain plant groups for 
any compound which experience proves to be present with 
similar morphological characters in other groups. 
It has been recently suggested 1 that many of the chemical 
compounds may serve the plant as means of defense against 
animals, and when we camphorize our furniture and poison our 
flower-beds, we are only imitating and reinventing what the 
plants practiced before the existence of man; and I may add 
that the cinchona-trees of malarial countries proclaimed long 
since their subtle therapeutical skill in securing for themselves 
a corner in quinine manufacture, independent of contempo¬ 
rary sources. 
A full acquaintance with the chemical compounds of living 
plant orders may even lead to a chemistry of paleo-botany, and 
where the fossil forms resemble modern groups, as in some of 
the well-preserved remains lately discovered in France, 2 the 
same chemical compounds might have existed as are now found 
in similar groups. From the knowledge which will one day be 
ours, of the morphology and evolution of chemical substances, 
a flora may be reconstructed reaching far back into the recesses 
of time. 
In minerals, plants, and animals the same principles recur, 
though, at each higher plane, under more complicated condi¬ 
tions; and any one who, on visiting the Hot Springs of the 
Yellowstone National Park, has seen the non-carboniferous 
gelatinous masses assuming the forms of organized life, will 
ask himself if silica, under some conditions, may not replace 
carbon and become living matter. Since Confervae do live in 
these springs at high temperature, perhaps some such locality 
as the Yellowstone may have been the birthplace of “a pro¬ 
toplasmic primordial atomic globule.” 
The impulse which directs minerals to masquerade as living 
plants and animals often manifests itself, for example, in the 
ferns called stag-horns; and orchids, disguised like insects, pre- 
1 M. Leo Errera, Royal Bot. Soc. of Belgium, Revue Seien., 29th Jan., 1887, 
2 M. Louis Crie, Comp. Rend., t. ciii, p. 1143. 
