Chapters in modern botany / by Patrick Geddes.

  • Patrick Geddes
Date:
1899
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Chapters in modern botany / by Patrick Geddes. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    approval, the more so because of its new and dramatic form, the plant, usually the passive prey of the animal, turning the tables and making the animal its victim. A great step was thus made towards realising that view of nature, that physiology not of the machinery of the indi- vidual merely, but of species in their relation to all the life around them, which it is probably the very greatest of all Darwin's services to have put before us in so many of its scenes. This is what many old writers meant by Natural History, and what too many modem German authors un- fortunately confuse with the well-established general name including all the fields of organic science as Biologic. Semper therefore prefers to speak of this his favourite study (see his Animal Life in International Science Series) as the physiology of organisms, of course in distinction to the physiology of organs. Mr. Wallace terms this the higher physiology, while Professor Ray Lankester has suggested the convenient term of bionomics. The last term has many advantages, not the least being that its very sound and form helps us to realise its meaning as expressing the economics of each of the innumerable species with which we share the planet. It is, we trust, likely to come into general use, and to supersede the vague or confused terms above mentioned. Bionomics.—It is important clearly to distinguish in the work and influence of Darwin the various elements ; since putting aside altogether his evolutionary theories, his work in thus reopening the study of natural history in its widest aspects, of constituting Bionomics as Cuvier did Compar- ative Anatomy or Palseontology, or Linnaeus Taxonomy, must always remain of the first magnitude. It is thus worth a little time fully to realise this. The child at first delightedly watches the bees and butterflies upon the flowers ; grown a little older he hunts and kills; and
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