PART II. 



PHYSIOLOGY OF PLANTS. 



CHAPTER I. 



REMARKS ON THE GENERAE CHARACTER OF PLANTS. 



Besides the consideration of plants as mere objects 

 of a system and holding a relation to each other, they 

 deserve a higher regard as forming an eminent part 

 of living and organized nature. Like animals, they 

 are subjects of life and death, and only differ essen- 

 tially from that higher order of beings in the want of 

 evident sensibility, for the few apparent and equivocal 

 exceptions to this universal rule, in the plants termed 

 sensitive, do not militate against its general application. 

 Nothing like nerves or a nervous sensorium are to be 

 found in the vegetable kingdom, and, consequently, no 

 display of that motion, energy, or irritability which be- 

 longs to the government of the different senses. The 

 propulsion of the sap, derived alone from a fluid pa- 

 pulum, and its elaboration in the vegetable tissue, in- 

 to which it immediately enters, appears at once the 

 simple source and cause, of all that inappreciable mo- 

 tion in this tribe of beings, which we term growth or 

 developement. 



The display of vegetable vitality, is, in many in- 

 stances, periodical. In those plants, which we indefi- 

 nitely term annuals, the whole period of existence ter- 



