Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 2.djvu/307

Rh  Virginica) are thrown out with such force as to strike people violently in the face who pass through the woods. Collecting a number of the capsules, and laying them on the floor, he found the seeds or embryos were thrown out generally to the distance of four or six feet, and in one instance as much as twelve feet.

Many of the instances of spontaneous motion or irritability we have now recorded may doubtless be explained by the application of known physical laws. With others this is not so easy; and it is but reasoning in a circle to say that, because the organisms which manifest them belong to the vegetable kingdom, therefore the phenomena cannot be the result of a sentient force acting upon, and independent of, matter. Darwin has described how certain movements of the tendrils of climbing plants would be termed instinctive if they were observed in animals. The rapid rotatory motion of the zoospores of the lower Algæ is absolutely undistinguishable from that of certain undoubted lowly organized forms of animal life. It is very difficult to distinguish between the movement of a shoot of a climber performing its circles in the air in search of a support, and that of the tentacula of a coral-polyp in search of food. The mode in which the Venus's Fly-trap seizes and encages its prey is very like that adopted by a sea-anemone. Every fresh addition to our knowledge seems to confirm us in the view that it is unwise to dogmatize by laying down too rigid generalities, and absolutely to deny certain functions to whole classes of animated beings because we do not find them exhibited in the forms most familiar to us. I do not wish distinctly to claim for plants the actual possession of a voluntary or sentient faculty. But I do wish to point out that facts do not support us in asserting that a clear line of demarcation separates the animal from the vegetable kingdom; the power of voluntary motion belonging to the one and not to the other. Taking all the facts we have described into consideration, the statement seems justified which has been made by one of our most experienced naturalists, Prof. Wyville Thomson: "There are certain phenomena, even among the higher plants, which it is very difficult to explain without admitting some low form of a general harmonizing and regulating function, comparable to such an obscure manifestation of reflex nervous action as we have in sponges and in other animals in which a distinct nervous system is absent."—Popular Science Review.