106 



Transactions, &c. — Annual Address. 



assist us to arrive at right conceptions of these matters. They will 

 be found in a paper read before the French Academy, in 1864, on 

 " Vegetation in Darkness." * He pointed out that the nutriment 

 contained in seeds and in animal eggs was of the same description : — 



Eggs. 

 " Albumen. 

 Fatty matters. 

 Milk sugar, glucose ? 

 SuljDliur, phosphorus, entering into 



organic compounds. 

 Phosphate of lime. 

 Water in great proportion. 



Seeds. 

 Albumen. 

 Fatty matters. 



Starch, dextrine able to form glucose. 

 Sulphur, phosphorus, entering into 



organic compounds. 

 Phosphate of lime. 

 Water in small proportion, cellulose." 



The seed requires moisture and oxygen from the air, and its 

 mode of germination is analogous to the incubation of the egg. 

 Citing the ' Statique des Etres Organises ' by himself and M. Dumas, 

 he observed: "We said (in 1841) at certain epochs, and in certain 

 organs, the plant becomes an animal; that like an animal it be- 

 comes an apparatus for combustion ; that it burns carbon and hy- 

 drogen ; that it produces heat ; that the sugar, or starch converted 

 into sugar, furnishes the first materials by which this character 

 is developed. The experiments I now bring before the Academy 

 complete this statement, by showing that a plant developed in the 

 dark, with stem, leaves and roots, behaves hke an animal during the 

 whole duration of its existence." M. Boussingault proceeded to 

 show that while the animal, in addition to emitting heat and car- 

 bonic acid in respiration, modified by resphatory combustion a 

 portion of the albumen it consumed into the nitrogenous crystalline 

 compound urea, the plant growing in the dark transformed part 

 of its albuminoid matter into a crystalline principle, asparagin, an 

 amide hke urea, and transformed into aspartate of ammonia with 

 as much facility as urea becomes transformed into carbonate of am- 

 monia. This asparagin is found in the juices of the cells, and thus 

 difiers from urea in not being an excretion. While the higher 

 plants are not so sharply and completely separated from the animal 

 kingdom as was formerly supposed, we must not be surprised if 

 organisms belonging to, or related to fungi, and whose mode of nu- 

 trition bears strong resemblance to that of animals, should often be 

 difficult to classify ; and similar difficulties are experienced in dealing 

 with some of the lower organisms living in ocean depths, and which 

 seem to perform the functions of plants. 



The connection of minute organisms of the nature of ferments 

 with disease has occupied attention during the past as in preceding 

 years. Dr. Lionel Beale, in a paper published in the last number 

 of the Monthly Journal, protests against the opinion entertained by 

 Mr. Simon and many others, that " each contagious disease is pro- 



* ' C. E.,' 1864, Prem. Sem., 917. 



