1477. All the planetary elements belong to germination, and to growth the Cosmical also with all its actions. To germination belongs earth, water, and air; to growth, light, heat, and gravity; with all the four mineral classes also, such as earth, salt, Inflammable, and metal. The plant contains silicious and calcareous earth, salts, coal with sulphur, and lastly, iron. 1478. Germination is the disjunctive emergence wrought by means of moisture, heat and oxydation in the processes of decomposition and fermentation. No seed germinates in irrespirable kinds of air. 1479. The cotyledons or seed-lobes are the synthesis of the two processes; they are at once root and leaf, therefore resolvable into mucus, and may yet become green. 1480. In germination the elemental bodies of the root-and stalk-polarity directly emerge; the mucus or the flour separates into alcaline gum, that seeks the darkness, and into acid sugar, which elevates itself into the illuminated air. GROWTH. 1481. Growth is none other than continued germination. The sap being polarized by the air becomes of necessity decomposed. One part evaporates as carbonic acid and water, the other coagulates into oxydized mucus or into cell-walls. 1482. Growth proceeds directly from the process of digestion and respiration, while its polar organs constantly remove further from each other. 1483. Properly speaking the digestive and respiratory processes are none other than growth, since both separate from each other. That, which originates between them, is the process of nutrition, the vascular system. 1484. Growth oscillates between the process of decomposition and that of fermentation; it is an uninterrupted fermentation. FALL OF THE LEAF. 1485. If every pole of the plant has been perfected in an isolated manner, it has thus become identical with the air, and the aerial process ceases. 1486. With the cessation of the aerial process, the respiratory organ must also die off or perish. 1487. The decadence, or falling off, of the leaves is the result of the tension having been abrogated between them and the stem; it is a death by suffocation. 1488. The fall of the leaf therefore occurs in the autumn, or after the fruit is matured. DURATION OF LIFE. 1489. The age of a plant is included between the the limits of the sap's impulse, and that which has been called its fall or descent. 1490. The actual fall of the sap is the death of the plant. 1491. If with the cessation of the influence of light, the polarity ceases entirely in the plant; it is then one year old or an _annual_. Every part of it dies off. 1492. In biennial plants the aerial polarity indeed disappears, but the polarity of the root remains. Flower, leaf, and stalk die. 1493. Perennial plants, also, do not entirely lose the stem-polarity, but only while they develop a new plant about the old. Flower and leaf only perish, while the water-and earth-organs remain alive.