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culture and horticulture be given yet at our Schools 

 by a duly qualified professor. 



Muscles are the chief instruments of voluntary 

 motion in men and animals, and popular comprehension 

 has hardly recognized, as yet, the fact of plant orga- 

 nization deing an exact analogue to that of human 

 beings. This has been generally supposed to be merely 

 a speculation or theory among the learned or ima- 

 ginative, and plants considered as rooted or fixed to 

 one place, while the question of movement has been 

 overlooked simply because plants do not rove about. 



It cannot be desired that the power to more may 

 be exercised in different modes and directions, while 

 the instruments may be essentially identical. 



In the human body movement is perpetual, and 

 by no means limited to the act of walking. Life itself 

 is movement and the contrary, in figurative speech, is 

 always understood to be an equivalent for death. 



The flux and reflux of currents in the growth and 

 development of plant life are continual, and readily 

 admitted by the most superficial observer but the 

 instruments of organs by which spontaneous movements 

 are made are not ordinarily admitted as even exist- 

 ing. 



Muscular contraction is to be found in those 

 fibres of the footstalks of leaves, which act in closing 

 their upper surfaces together, or bending them dav^n- 

 ward ; within the claws of petals, and divisions of the 



