Germination of a Scarlet Runner.
a. The ripe bean, showing the hilum at *;
b. The same bean, with one cotyledon removed, to show the plumule.
c. A similar bean, twenty-four hours after planting.
d. The same, on the sixth day after planting.
e. The same, on the twelfth day.
f. The same, on the fourteenth day.
N.B. From b, c, d, e, the front cotyledon has been cut away, to show the progress of the plumule.
Was this the commencement of its existence? O no! Six months earlier still it was snugly lying, with several others like itself, in a green fleshy pod, to the interior of which it was organically attached. A month before that, this same pod with its contents was the centre of a scarlet butterfly-like flower, the bottom of its pistil, within which, if you had split it open, you would have discerned the tiny beans, whose history we are tracing backwards, each imbedded in the soft green tissue, but no bigger than the eye of a cambric needle.
But where was this flower? It was one of many that glowed on my garden wall all through last summer; each cluster springing as a bud from a slender twining stem, which was the exact counterpart of that with which we commenced this little life-history.
And this earlier stem,—what of it? It too had been a shoot, a pair of cotyledons with a plumule, a seed, an integral part of a carpel, which was a part of an earlier flower, that expanded from an earlier bud, that grew out of an earlier stem, that had been a still earlier seed, that had been—and backward, ad infinitum, for aught that I can perceive.
The course, then, of a scarlet runner is a circle, without beginning or end:—that is, I mean, without a natural, a normal beginning or end. For at what point of its history can you put your finger, and say, "Here is the commencement of this organism, before which there is a blank; here it began to exist?" There is no such point; no stage which does not look back to a previous stage, on which this stage is inevitably and absolutely dependent.
To some of my readers this may be rendered more clear by the accompanying diagram:——
legume—reed—cotyledons—shoot—stem—bud—flower—carpel