11 



It appears to me that the only theory capable of explaining the di- 

 rection of the fibre, is one that will apply to some peculiar laws ex- 

 isting between the granules themselves and between the granules and 

 the vital force residing in the vessel or cell in which they are contain- 

 ed. There can be no doubt that at first the granules are in the jelly, 

 consequently as they become sufficiently developed they acquire free- 

 dom of motion, and attraction commences between the wall of the cell 

 and the granules, and it can be easily imagined how these numerous 

 atoms may be induced to approach to the circumference of the vessel, 

 but the difficulty of the proposition is to account for their doing so in 

 a spiral or other determinate form, and always of the same figure in 

 the same situation in the same plant. 



Some part of the law, I believe, is made tolerably clear, viz., that 

 fibre is composed of granules arranging themselves like beads on a 

 string, which become nourished by the contents of the vessel until a 

 perfect thread is the result, and the direction this takes seems to me 

 to be the result of some special power residing in the vessel under the 

 control of the whole plant, probably electrical ; * and which is modifi- 

 ed in the several vessels I have enumerated: farther than this I believe 

 we cannot go, though nature occasionally alters forms, she seldom 

 varies much in her laws, but what these may be it is forbidden the eye 

 of man at present to detect, and they appear to me, though operating 

 in such minute spaces, to be stamped with as much permanency of 

 power in the formation of these curious and elegant organs, as those 

 laws on a grander scale are in the fashioning of our own frame, or in 

 the maintaining of the stability of the universe. 



* If particles of gold leaf be mixed with water, and the chain from an electrical 

 machine be made to convey electricity to the fluid, the gold particles arrange them- 

 selves in a spiral form ; and it may possibly happen that the currents of electricity, 

 which are continually passing from tbe earth to the air through the tissues and fluids 

 of plants, may have some share in determining, in the same manner, the spiral direc- 

 tion of the floating elements of the fibre. 



