Omphalos: An Attempt to Untie the Geological Knot

by Philip Henry Gosse

GARDEN TULIP.
Fig. 1. A flower with two petals removed, to show the ovary, a. Fig. 2. The same ovary, more mature, divided longitudinally; b, the unripe seeds, packed on each other; c, a portion of the same carpel, from which the seeds have been removed.

This single infolding leaf, that is just shooting from the soil, so small and feeble,—what of this? There are certainly no concentric cylinders of timber here: can we trace a previous history of this?

Yes: by carefully removing the soil from the base, we see that it originates in a flat yellow seed—the seed of a Tulip. Here again we have no difficulty in detecting evidence of its former attachment. A great number of these seeds were once closely packed one on another, in each of the three carpels that constituted the capsule. And this capsule had been the oblong, three-sided ovary, which formed the body of the pistil in some beautiful Tulip.

Do you observe these two round fleshy leaves, just peeping from the sandy earth? They are the earliest growths of a plant of Arachis hypogæa. In this case again, to understand the true relations of this organism, we must expose it wholly to view.

Beneath the surface of the earth, then, I find that these seed-leaves are the two halves (cotyledons) of a kind of pea, which was formerly enclosed in a wrinkled skinny pod. But what is most interesting is that the pod is here, the cotyledons shooting out of it. And, attached to one end of the pod, here is a slender stalk, now withered and dry, which projects out of the ground into the air.

GERMINATION OF EARTH-PEA.

Now here we have a beautiful link of connexion with the past. The plant before us does not ripen its seeds, and then drop them to care for themselves, as most plants do. "The young fruit, instead of being placed at the bottom of the calyx, as in other kinds of pulse, is found at the bottom and in the inside of a long slender tube, which looks like a flower-stalk. When the flower has withered, and the young fruit is fertilized, nothing but the bottom of the tube with its contents remains. At this period a small point projects from the summit of the young fruit, and gradually elongates, curving downwards towards the earth. At the same time the stalk of the fruit lengthens, until the small point strikes the earth, into which the now half-grown fruit is speedily forced, and where it finally ripens in what would seem a most unnatural position."[92]

The young plant before us has been this moment created, and created in this incipient stage of growth: and yet there is, even here, an indubitable evidence, so far as physical phenomena can afford it, of a past history. It would be utterly impossible to select any stage in the life of the Earth-pea, which did not connect itself, visibly and palpably, with a previous stage.

Let us return to the shore-loving Mangrove. You object to my assumption that it was created as a tree, with a well-branched stem elevated upon a series of arching roots; and to my deduction of pre-lapsed years for the formation of those roots. Very well. I give it up. You allow that the primitive Mangrove was created in some stage, but you contend for the germ-stage, the simplest condition of the plant, whatever that might be.