Page:History of botany (Sachs; Garnsey).djvu/185

 relations of position of the leaves of a side-shoot connect with those of the mother-axis, and which made it possible to represent the nature of inflorescences especially with extreme clearness by means of geometrical figures. An expressive and elegant terminology not only made the whole theory attractive, but fitted it in a high degree to supply a suitable, plain, and precise phraseology for describing the most varied forms of plants. That the theory possesses such advantages as these may be gathered from the fact, that since 1835 the morphological examination and comparison not only of flowers and inflorescences, but also of vegetative shoots and their ramification, has reached great formal completeness. A thorough acquaintance with the principle of this doctrine has made it possible to explain to reader or hearer the most intricate forms of plants so clearly, that they may be said to reveal the law of their formation themselves, and to grow before the eye of the observer, while at the same time the most recondite relations of the organs of the same or of different plants were brought out distinctly and in elegant phraseology. When this mode of description was combined with De Candolle's views on abortion, degeneration, and adherence, and at the same time took into consideration the chief physiological forms of leaf-structures, according as these were developed as scales, foliage-leaves, bracts, floral envelopes, staminal and carpellary leaves, it was possible to give such an artistic account of every form of plant, as made it visible to sense in its entirety, and at the same time brought out the morphological law of its construction. Whoever reads the writings of Alexander Braun and Wydler, and especially of Thilo Irmisch (after 1873), who knew how to combine his descriptions in a variety of ways with remarks on the biological relations of plants, cannot fail to admire the extraordinary skill displayed by these men in describing plants. Compared with the dry diagnoses of the systematists, their descriptions attain to the dignity of an art, and present the commonest forms to the reader in a new