Page:History of botany (Sachs; Garnsey).djvu/561

] majority of writers, in accordance with the tendencies of the age, professed their desire to refer the phenomena of life in plants not to an unknown principle called the soul, but to mechanical and physical causes; but they did not apply their minds to the examination of these phenomena with that strenuous effort, which in this subject especially could alone lead to a complete and satisfactory explanation of them.

Linnaeus studied the periodical movements of flowers in 1751 and those of leaves in 1755, but a mechanical explanation of them was not to be expected from him; he contented himself with pointing out the external conditions of these phenomena in many species, with classifying them, and giving the periodical movements a new name by calling the positions assumed by night the sleep of plants; nor did he use the word at all in a metaphorical sense, for he saw in this sleep of plants a phenomenon entirely analogous to sleep in animals. That the sleep-movements were not capricious but due to external influences was with him a necessary consequence from the nature and idea of the plant, which was that of a living and growing being, only without sensation. But it should be mentioned that he stated correctly that the movements connected with the sleep of plants are not caused by changes of temperature, or not by these only, but by change of light, since they take place in the uniform temperature of a conservatory.

Linnaeus' account of these kinds of movement was only formal, it is true, but still it was well-arranged and clear; the treatment of the same and other movements by his contemporary Bonnet was quite the reverse. It is scarcely possible to imagine anything more shapeless, such an utter confusion of things entirely different from one another, as is to be found in Bonnet's experiments and reflections on the various movements of leaves and stems in his work on the function of leaves, published in 1754; geotropic and heliotropic curvatures, nutations and periodic movements, are all run one into another; a person who understands something of the subject may find