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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    form always arises by processes as functional forms. They obey the law of the shortest process and are always attempts to find optimal solutions of the problem to be solved. Every process thus produces for itself its technical form; cooling requires cooling surfaces, pressure occurs only at points of pressure; pull only along lines of pull. Movement produces forms of movement, every energy its form of energy. Thus life has its form of life. Each of its functions has its corresponding form. And life as a unity working together has its own individuality. (Everyone who has only the slightest scientific education knows it). It is in its simplest form proto- plasm, or in its bodily form, the cell. Here, then, an excellent definition of the cell is offered to us: It is the bodily form of life. By that definition the adventurous and strange little grey being which we call a living cell filled with protoplasm becomes intelligible. All its pecularities are explained if we look upon it as one of the optimal forms of the functions of life. What can a living cell do, what must it do in order to maintain its life. It must be material, substantial, if it is to have any influence upon the things of the world. It must have matter therefore. The cell, before it adopts its special form, must have the faculty of being moulded into every form. Therefore the protoplasm is fluid and elastic, it is amoeboid. Its outer surface has the facility of unlimited movement, for it is formless and capable of taking every form. According to the type of movement, it adopts an optimal form for its functions: a form of feet in order to creep, a waving undul- ating border in order to propel itself through the water, and the whip in order to swim swiftly. In the protoplasm itself each of its actions has modelled corresponding parts according to the law of the least re- sistance for propagation, the cell-kernel; for secretion, bubbles filled with air and liquid and the secretion, compressed into the least space, the sphere like little grains. (See 111. 2.) Down to the lowest visible limits there is no atom which does not obey the law of its bodily form. And it must conform to it, whether it is a cell living for itself and no larger than a grain of dust, or whether it is only a part of a greater system which we can observe, and see every day as\ a plant or an animal.