And the mathematician finds in it a new beauty, from its
marvellous correspondence with the motions of a pendulum,--the
algebraic expression of the two being identical.
The forms of organic life afford, however, the best examples of the
dominion of our fundamental canon. The infinite variety of vegetable
forms, all beautiful, and each one different in its beauty, is all the
result of simple laws. It is true that these simple laws are not as yet
all discovered; but the one great discovery of Phyllotaxis, which shows
that all plants follow one law in the arrangement of their leaves upon
the stem, thereby intimates in unmistakable language the simplicity and
unity of all organic vegetable laws; and a similar assurance is given
by the morphological reduction of all parts to a metamorphosed leaf.
The law of phyllotaxis, like that of the elastic curve, is carried out
in time as well as in space. As the formula for the elastic curve is
the same as that for the pendulum, so the law by which the spaces of
the leaves are divided in scattering them round the stem, to give each
its opportunity for light and air, is the same as that by which the
times of the planets are proportioned to keep them scattered about the
sun, and prevent them from gathering on one side of their central orb.
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