280 Mr. Burnett on the Functions 



another" as the most distinguishing characteristic between 

 brutes and plants. Age after age have these observations been 

 repeated and re-echoed in almost every diversity of form ; — 

 thus Aristotle designated plants, animals turned inside out, while 

 Jungius, Ludwig, Ray, and others, ringing their successive 

 changes in scarcely differing words, define plants to be "organic 

 bodies fixed to a certain place whence they are nourished and 

 encreased ; M or, as Boerhaave and Martin state the question, 

 11 adhering to another body in such a manner as to draw from 

 it their nutriment:" and hence Linnaeus, as the Stagirite had 

 done before him, described a plant, and not inaptly, as an 

 inverted animal. These definitions, though at first sight plau- 

 sible, are too superficial, admit too many exceptions, and are 

 clouded by too many obscurities, for the rule ever to have been 

 made absolute, even as a popular test ; and once gave rise 

 to a repetition of that practical sophism, which it is said was long 

 since enacted with regard to Plato's famous definition of a man, 

 viz. "that he is an unfledged biped;" upon which the Cynic 

 philosopher, having plucked a fowl, is reported to have 

 exclaimed, " Behold Plato's man !" And thus the simple sac- 

 culate polypes have been turned inside out, and then the 

 question asked, whether such an inverted animal had become 

 a plant. 



Continual reference we find both is and has been made, to 

 the roots and absorbents of the vegetable body being external, 

 i. e. distributed without itself, for plants even when vagrant as 

 the Lemna of our ponds, and the Confervas of our lakes and 

 streams, still are in communion with their peculiar site, be 

 it earth, air, or water; i. e. as Link observes, " deriving nou- 

 rishment from the soil in which they grow." 



Many physiologists hence would explicate the problem, why 

 locomotion is so commonly the privilege of animals, and as 

 necessarily, in general, denied to plants. For as life is alone 

 sustained by the constant reparation of that machine which its 

 actions as unremittingly impair, those beings which depend for 

 this uninterrupted renovation upon supplies ever situate with- 

 out themselves, must consequently be held in uninterrupted 

 connexion with their external food — that is, with the soil in 

 which they grow ; whilst those which can intuscept their food 

 (upon which they in like manner grow) are unrestrained to 



