Biotechnics : the practice of synthesis in the work of Patrick Geddes

in the modern history of the Natural Sciences, botany and zoology.

‘How many people think twice about a leaf? Yet the leaf is the chief product and phenomenon of Life: this is a green world, with animals comparatively few and small, and all depending upon the leaves. By leaves we live. Some people have strange ideas that they live by money. They think energy is generated by the circulation of the coins. Whereas the world is mainly a vast leaf-colony, growing on and forming a leafy soil, not a mere mineral mass: and we live not by the jingling of our coins, but by the fullness of our harvests. Moreover, the leaves made the coal: coal is but plant-life fossilized; and hence the coalminers are the modern masters of Energy. Not so long ago these men were literally sold with the mines—they were thus actually serfs, if not slaves, until the roth century; but now, in the twentieth, they are claiming a directive share in the energy they set loose. From the fossil-leafage which they deal with, has come the past industrial revolution, and now is threatened another.

‘The Germans, like the machine and money worshippers at home—for this Darwinism is really an economic theory—say the world is one of “tooth and claw”; but there were some of us who had tried also to “consider the lilies, how they grow”. I sincerely believe that the author of that saying knew and meant what he was saying, and that as literally as we do!

“You see, the Catholic reads this verse, so he cuts the lilies, and puts them on the altar; then the Protestant comes along and throws them out! That is too much as yet the history of Christianity. But this very science of Botany, in which both types of would-be Christians have seen so little, is left alone in its centuries of endeavour seriously to obey this counsel, to consider the lilies and find out how they grow. See here how tall and strong this one is growing, seeming to be using all its energies for itself. But next see how this one is going through a conversion, for there are the buds; and this one in bloom is now living for its species—flowering magnificently, and so also

now only fully individualizing itself in blossom. And its

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