THE SPECIAL SENSES OF PLANTS. 



Aside from the tales of travelers, the varied 

 plant myths, and the inventions of story 

 writers, there have been fancies and beliefs 

 held by learned men in past ages, which in- 

 vested plants with specific powers differing 

 from those of animals only in clearness of 

 manifestation. Not until the middle of the 

 present century, however, did the commonly 

 observed movements of plants receive any 

 genuine interpretation. Aristotle and his fol- 

 lowers to the time of Cesalpino (1583), 

 vaguely ascribed a soul to plants which di- 

 rected their vital operations and distinguished 

 them from lifeless nature. Jung, a contem- 

 porary of Kepler, Galileo and Descartes, who 

 dominated botanical thought in Germany 

 during the seventeenth century, expressed his 



*Condensed from a presidential address before the Indiana 

 Academy of Sciences, December 27, 1893. 



