Plants as inventors / by R.H. Francé.

  • Francé, R. H. (Raoul Heinrich), 1874-1943.
Date:
1923
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Plants as inventors / by R.H. Francé. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    two generations ago: the thought of selection, is recognized as a nearly self-evident law of the world, and most simple derivations are so clear that everyone is almost able to examine them in his own mind. Each form changes, none of them is enduring until it is Ihe optimal form which then always corresponds to the nature of things. Uninterruptedly, by a mechanical world-selection, new forms are selected and an imperfect thing cannot abide, but must develop until it is perfect in accordance with its nature. All changes however take place according to the law of the least expenditure of energy; a process which may be called the law of economy. It is the law of every function that it seeks by selection to become the shortest process. Translated into a quite simple example, a stone which has lost its position of rest seeks to find it again in the shortest way; and of many stones rolling down a mountain, that one will find its position of rest soonest which is falling perpendicularly. The process itself is natural for us because of its certainty and regularity.' We see it take place often and from this experience we abstract the notion of the law of gravitation, a general law of nature. The shortest way by which a process comes to its conclusion is its law of nature. Things arrive at their eternal position of rest, when they attain their optimal condition of rest, when they exert a minimum of opposition to that condition. 1 concede without any objection that I am carrying these thoughts to a tedious, tiresome extreme. But the reader who followed my reasoning will concede that now the top is reached and that he is rewarded by a wider outlook. For now we understand what laws of nature are, and that to every process belong, by necessity, fundamental forms of change. If you descend from the regions of these last abstractions, in the cold atmosphere of which you have tarried so long, you can express the same thing much more intelligibly and much more simply in the thesis now completely motivated for us: Every event has its necessary technical form. The technical 111. 2. The structure of protoplasm. 1. Comb-structure from a swinging-thread-cell. 2. Comb-structure of a bacteria (b- lineola). 3. Kernel-structure of an infusorium. 4. Sketch of the structure of protoa plasmic elementary threads according to Fayod and Entz. 5. Thread-building in . dividing cell-kernel. 6. Protoplasm. Sphere-bubbles of a primitive animal (Colloxoum) 7. Plasma spiral-threads (seed-thread of a snail, fieolis).