RELATIONAL PLANT MORPHOLOGY

Abstract

ALTHOUGH occasional protests have been made by plant morphologists for many years against the inflexible framework of morphological concepts to which they have felt compelled to adhere in interpreting their experimental data, little attempt has been made to discard the defective outlook of traditional morphology in favour of something more adequate. Implicit in most botanical text-books and accepted by the majority even of research workers is the notion that morphology consists largely of the establishment of categories, such as chromosome, cell, vessel, periblem, pericycle, root, stem, leaf and stipule, into which all the diversity of plant structure has to be forced ; and structures as dissimilar as cotyledons, stamens and carpels, which happen to fall in the same pigeon-hole, in this case labeled 'leaf', are then described as related by the bond of 'homology'.