74 WHAT IS A PLANT ? 



the Arthropoda generally. It probably belongs to the class of 

 connective tissue structures. 



[The Explanation of Plates will be given at the end of Part II.] 



Mbat 16 a plant ? 



By H. W. S. Worsley-Benison, F.L.S., 



Lecturer on Botany at Westminster Hospital, President of the 

 Highbury Microscopical and Scientific Society. 



Part I. 



SO powerful is the influence of early education, or of any long- 

 cherished notion on the mind, that at first sight the ques- 

 tion forming the title of this paper would appear to many 

 readers one almost absurd, and certainly one easily answered in a 

 sentence. 



Let us see how far this idea is a true one. 

 ' The popular description of a plant would be that it is a more 

 or less green-coloured organism, with (in most cases) a stem and 

 branches bearing leaves and flowers ; that it is fixed in the soil, 

 having no motile power ; that it is devoid of all power of sensa- 

 tion or digestion ; finally, that by these characters it is easily and 

 clearly distinguished from any member of the sister kingdom. 



As a rough-and-ready diagnosis between the two kingdoms, 

 this, in times gone by, has done duty. In the present state of 

 scientific knowledge, and in the light of later discoveries in bio- 

 logy, such a conception becomes not only useless, but absolutely 

 illogical and impossible. We must abandon, not this set of 

 characters alone, but even those distinctions which were at one 

 time held by Cuvier himself. The result is, that as the former 

 typical distinctions break down one by one, we find our self-set 

 task of defining what a plant is, as opposed to an animal, by no 

 means so easy as in our complacent ignorance we imagined it to 

 be. 



