things.'

*

To become more familiar with the conception of the ur-plant, let us
bring the life-cycle of the plant before our inner eye once again.
There, all the different organs of the plant-leaf, blossom, fruit, etc.
- appear as the metamorphic revelations of the one, identical active
principle, a principle which gradually manifests itself to us by way of
successive heightening from the cotyledons to the perfected glory of
the flower. Amongst all the forms which thus appear in turn, that of
the leaf has a special place; for the leaf is that organ of the plant
in which the ground-plan of all plant existence comes most immediately
to expression. Not only do all the different leaf forms arise, through
endless changing, out of each other, but the leaf, in accordance with
the same principle, also changes itself into all the other organs which
the plant produces in the course of its growth.

It is by precisely the same principle that the ur-plant reveals itself
in the plant kingdom as a whole. Just as in the single plant organism
the different parts are a graduated revelation of the ur-plant, so are
the single kinds and species within the total plant world. As we let
our glance range over all its ranks and stages (from the single-celled,
almost formless alga to the rose and beyond to the tree), we are
following, step by step, the revelation of the ur-plant. Barely hinting
at itself in the lowest vegetable species, it comes in the next higher
stages into ever clearer view, finally streaming forth in full glory in
the magnificence of the manifold blossoming plants. Then, as its
highest creation, it brings forth the tree, which, itself a veritable
miniature earth, becomes the basis for innumerable single plant