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not particularly startling even at the present day, for he taught that 

 plants possess "only that kind of soul, by which they are nourished, grow, 

 and produce their like," the capacity for sensation and movement being 

 denied to them. If I mistake not, the popular notion of plants in our own 

 day does not differ essentially from this scholastic philosophy of several 

 centuries ago. 



The second period of development of the ideas respecting sensation in 

 plants, or we might better say the want of sensation in plants, was opened 

 by the famous dictum of Linnse-us that, " minerals grow, plants grow 

 and move, animals grow, move and feel." Linnreus' great prominence as 

 a systematist gave to this dogma special force, although in reality it was 

 but a slight modification of the teaching of Cesalpino, already referred to, 

 and of his successor Jung. Much of the controlling opinion of the greatest 

 philosophical botanists down to the present century can be traced back to 

 these two scholastics. Jung was a contemporary of Kepler, Galileo and 

 Descartes, and dominated botanical thought in Germany, as Cesalpino had 

 done in Italy. He expressed his view in the sentence : " Planta est corpus 

 vlvens non sentiens." 



The force of Linnseus' aphorism was more in its form than in its newness, 

 in spite of the fact that he ascribed motion to plants, for it seemed to sep- 

 arate nature into three sharply delimited kingdoms: mineral, vegetable 

 and animal. Botanists and zoologists have from that time to within a few 

 years of the present been fruitlessly attempting to find infallible charac- 

 ters for distinguishing animals and plants. The discovery of protoplasm 

 in 1846, of its identity in the animal and vegetable organism somewhat 

 later, and the publication of the origin of species in 1859, brought an end 

 to the old order of things, gave rational unity to the organic world, founded 

 a science of biology, and converted the scholastic method of studying na- 

 ture into the dynamic method. At the present time the motto of the 

 botanist is " the study of plants as living things," and by acting upon it 

 the science has been redeemed from the lethargic state of being " a chron- 

 icle of the dead," as Julian Hawthorne characterises it, into a subject of 

 immediate and vital interest. 



The fact that plants possess sensibility, or as the text-books now say, ir- 

 ritability, was made conspicuous and put beyond all doubt, even with the 

 unlearned, when the sensitive plant {Mimosa ptidica) was discovered in 

 America and taken to the gardens of Europe. A plant of such easy culture 

 in either the garden or the conservatory, and possessing such wonderful 



