Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 8.djvu/661



N the whole history of science there is nothing more remarkable than the rapidity of the growth of biological knowledge within the last half century, and the extent of the modification which has thereby been effected in some of the fundamental conceptions of the naturalist.

In the second edition of the "Règne Animal," published in 1828, Cuvier devotes a special section to the "Division of Organized Beings into Animals and Vegetables," in which the question is treated with that comprehensiveness of knowledge and clear critical judgment which characterize his writings, and justify us in regarding them as representative expressions of the most extensive, if not the profoundest, knowledge of his time. He tells us that living beings have been subdivided from the earliest time into animated beings, which possess sense and motion, and inanimated beings, which are devoid of these functions, and simply vegetate.

Although the roots of plants direct themselves toward moisture, and their leaves toward air and light; although the parts of some plants exhibit oscillating movements without any perceptible cause, and the leaves of others retract when touched, yet none of these movements justify the ascription to plants of perception or of will.

From the mobility of animals, Cuvier, with his characteristic partiality for teleological reasoning, deduces the necessity of the existence in them of an alimentary cavity or reservoir of food, whence their nutrition may be drawn by the vessels, which are a sort of internal roots; and in the presence of this alimentary cavity he naturally sees the primary and the most important distinction between animals and plants.