Organography (from
Greek
Greek may refer to:
Greece
Anything of, from, or related to Greece, a country in Southern Europe:
*Greeks, an ethnic group.
*Greek language, a branch of the Indo-European language family.
**Proto-Greek language, the assumed last common ancestor ...
, ''organo'', "
organ
Organ may refer to:
Biology
* Organ (biology), a part of an organism
Musical instruments
* Organ (music), a family of keyboard musical instruments characterized by sustained tone
** Electronic organ, an electronic keyboard instrument
** Hammond ...
"; and , ''
-graphy
The English suffix -graphy means a "field of study" or related to "writing" a book, and is an anglicization of the French ''-graphie'' inherited from the Latin ''-graphia'', which is a transliterated direct borrowing from Greek.
Arts
* Cartogr ...
'') is the scientific description of the structure and function of the organs of living things.
History
Organography as a scientific study starts with
Aristotle
Aristotle (; grc-gre, Ἀριστοτέλης ''Aristotélēs'', ; 384–322 BC) was a Greek philosopher and polymath during the Classical period in Ancient Greece. Taught by Plato, he was the founder of the Peripatetic school of phil ...
, who considered the parts of plants as "organs" and began to consider the relationship between different organs and different functions. In the 17th century Joachim Jung, clearly articulated that plants are composed of different organ types such as root, stem and leaf, and he went on to define these organ types on the basis of form and position.
In the following century Caspar Friedrich Wolff was able to follow the development of organs from the "growing points" or apical meristems. He noted the commonality of development between foliage leaves and floral leaves (e.g. petals) and wrote: "In the whole plant, whose parts we wonder at as being, at the first glance, so extraordinarily diverse, I finally perceive and recognize nothing beyond leaves and stem (for the root may be regarded as a stem). Consequently all parts of the plant, except the stem, are modified leaves."
Similar views were propounded at by Goethe in his well-known treatise. He wrote: "The underlying relationship between the various external parts of the plant, such as the leaves, the calyx, the corolla, the stamens, which develop one after the other and, as it were, out of one another, has long been generally recognized by investigators, and has in fact been specially studied; and the operation by which one and the same organ presents itself to us in various forms has been termed Metamorphosis of Plants."
See also
*
morphology (biology)
Morphology is a branch of biology dealing with the study of the form and structure of organisms and their specific structural features.
This includes aspects of the outward appearance (shape, structure, colour, pattern, size), i.e. external mo ...
References
External links
Organography of plants, especially of the Archegoniata and Spermaphyta, by Dr. K. Goebel
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Branches of biology