Page:History of botany (Sachs; Garnsey).djvu/556

536 tioned the heliotropic movements of the stalks of many flowers, which he says were for that reason called heliotropic flowers; in the following century Pliny says that the leaves of clover close when bad weather is approaching; Albertus Magnus in the 13th century, Valerius Cordus and Garcias del Huerto in the 16th, thought the daily periodical movements of the pinnate leaves of some Leguminosae worth recording; Cesalpino noticed the movements of tendrils and climbing plants, and was surprised to see that the latter to some extent seek for their supports. These were every-day phenomena, but the striking sensitiveness of the leaves of Mimosa pudica introduced from America could not fail to attract attention, and so we find an essay on the causes of it in Robert Hooke's 'Micrographia' of 1667. The irritability of the stamens of Centaurea had been already mentioned by Borelli in 1653.

1. We meet with the first speculations on the subject at the end of the 17th century. Ray in his 'Historia Plantarum' (1693) commences his general considerations on the nature of the plant with a succinct account of phytodynamical phenomena, and introduces the whole by a sentence of Jung: '{{lang|la|Planta est corpus vivens non sentiens,]]' etc. Though Ray, like Cesalpino, seems to believe in the Aristotelian soul of plants, yet he does on the whole endeavour to explain the movements which he describes by physical and mechanical laws; he thinks that the irritability of Mimosa in particular is not due to sensation, but to known physical causes; the movement of the leaf when it is touched is caused by a contraction, which again is due to a withering or relaxation of its parts. He endeavours to apply the knowledge of his time to the explanation of the mechanical process: leaves, he says, remain tense only because the loss by evaporation is kept constantly supplied by the water that flows to them from the stem; if then in consequence of a touch the sap-passages of the leaves are pressed together, the supply of water is not sufficient to prevent their becoming relaxed. Ray mixes up together