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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    every possibility of formation and the artist's fancy seems a bungling imitator in comparison. This has been proved by an experiment. Several artists were asked to create as many variations of a decorative form as they could. They could draw only a few dozen, although in the world of unicellular bodies there are hundreds of different models. You may try the same experiment in order Technical Arrangements of Unicellular Organisms (Radiolariae) which combine solidity of protoplasmic structure with the faculty of swift swimming. to convince yourself. Try to draw variations of one of the fundamental forms on a sheet of paper. You can start with the ball, carrying it through all the egg-shapes, elliptic, shell, trellis-work ball, star, etc., and see how soon you will stop. Then you may pick up a volume on algaeology, — preferably plant algaeology, — and you will then become forever con- vinced that living matter as an inventor of forms cannot be matched by man. But what you can see in the world of cells recurs again in the structures which the cells build together. A long time before science had conceived the idea of the cell, about the time when the first clumsy attempts were made to gaze into the interior magnificence of life through poor' microscopes, the fantastic Swede, Swedberg, whom the world knows only