118 Analogy between Vegetables and Animals. 



the fluid silently and imperceptibly. I have indeed sometimes 

 seen one all round a tree, which must have been by a stroke, 

 from which trees are by no means exempt. I confess I have 

 never been able to produce a single spot by electricity: 

 though a learned friend and myself one summer collected and 

 repeatedly discharged a prodigious accumulation of battery 

 on the grass-plot before my dining-room window: but it 

 requires, to produce a very small ring, an incalculably larger 

 column than it is in the utmost power of man to accumulate 

 or discharge. The following year, however, my friend was 

 pleasingly amazed at beholding a noble fairy ring on the very 

 spot ! and was long in doubting suspense, till I informed him 

 I had made it with what really acted on the same principles, 

 — fresh soot. 



I remember (though for relating it " I may chance have 

 some odd quirks and remnants of wit broken on me " ), when 

 a youth at Christ-church, some Oxford wags traced with 

 gunpowder, and fired on the short-mown grass of the Grand 

 Quadrangle in that College, in large capitals, the short mono- 

 syllable that so much appears to puzzle poor Malvolio in the 

 epistle forged by his Mistress Olivia's chambermaid ; and to 

 the affected indignation of the old dons, and the titillatory fun 

 of the merry Oxonians, the little word flourished there in 

 brown and green for two years ; and may be still talked of yet 

 in those frolicksome regions, by such humourists as, 



Sir, yours, 



John F. M. Dovaston, 

 WestJ'elton, near Shrewsburj/, 

 Dec, SO. ISU. 



Art. II. An Essay on the Analogy between the Structure and 

 Functions of Vegetables and Animals. By William Gordon, 

 Esq., Surgeon, Welton, near Hull. Read before the Hull Lite- 

 rary and Philosophical Society, Nov. 19. 1830. Communicated 

 by Mr. Gordon, 



(^Continued from p. 30.) 



Having now given this brief outline of the nervous system, 

 I shall proceed to prove that there is a structure very analo- 

 gous to it in plants. In the first place, the most superficial 

 observer cannot but have perceived the great similitude that 

 there is between the pith of vegetables and the spinal cord of 

 animals. They are both surrounded by a membranous cover- 

 ing; they are in every way carefully protected from injury; 

 and they both send off branches in a manner precisely analo- 



