| 264 The Rev. Patrick KEITH on 
in the vegetable kingdom? The necessity is in both cases the 
same; the support and preservation of life, of which the vege- 
table exhibits indubitable indications as well as the animal, 
though inferior in degree. And the principle has indeed been 
claimed, particularly, as I believe, by Dr. Percival of Manchester, 
though I am not acquainted with the grounds on which he rests 
his claim, not having hitherto had an opportunity of consulting 
his Paper on the subject. But on whatever grounds the claim 
may have been advanced, it cannot by any means be regarded as 
extravagant or absurd, sanctioned as it is by the analogy of the 
animal kingdom, and by the necessity of assigning a cause ade- 
quate to the production of the effect. For if we must acknow- 
ledge that no cause merely chemical or mechanical is sufficient 
to account for the direction that is invincibly assumed by the 
radicle and plumelet respectively, in the process of the germina- 
tion of the seed, we must also of necessity admit the agency of 
some cause of a higher order, which can be nothing short of an 
attribute of the vital principle ofthe plantitself. And the lowest 
cause we can possibly assign, as well as the only cause we can 
warrantably assign, is that of an attribute that shall be analogous 
to the faculty of animal instinct, as being the lowest principle of 
action influencing a living being; and the only acknowledged 
cause found to operate in analogous cases ; as well as perhaps 
the only efficient cause by which the apparently spontaneous 
movements of the plant are in any case directed. 
Some of the ancients seem indeed to have claimed for plants 
principles of action of a much higher order, and to have attri- 
buted the desires and passions of animals even to the vegetable 
‚race*, thus regarding as a fact, what the author of The Loves of 
‘Plants regarded no doubt as a fiction, and nrang the vegetable 
* Agıor, Ilsgı Purwv, Lib, I, 
almost 
