Some fundamental considerations on the ‘New morphology’

Abstract

Summary Some questions discussed in and conclusions arrived at in the above paper are: 1. 1.Paleobotany changed the face of Morphology. 2. 2.Did Life develop out of the inanimate world in one single period or has it done so continually? 3. 3.Did the taxonomic ‘levels’ (categories of increasing size and discontinuity) now recognised rise at one given period, or do they continue to widen their scope? 4. 4.Why are ‘intermediates’ in paleontology so rare? 5. 5.Two elementary processes in the evolution of plants are: (more or less slow) growth alterations and (more or less sudden) differentiation. 6. 6.Differentiation primarily arises from unequal cell-division; growth changes are functions of tissues (meristems), due to physiological causes. Both are genetically determined. 7. 7.The concept of homology rests on inequality of daughter-cells of a cell-division and, though more vaguely, on the comparison of organs to which growth alterations are ascribed (cf. point 28). 8. 8.The concept ‘leaf’ has no morphologic...