3i 6 STUDIES IN LIFE AND SENSE. 



or saw which despoils it of its branches, or which may fell it in all 

 its glory to the ground ? So apparently negative are the replies to 

 these questions, that, in so far as the evidence of the senses is 

 concerned, the opinion that plants merely grow and nothing more 

 seems at first sight of most justifiable kind. 



But the evidence of the senses does not terminate in scientific 

 investigation where it ends for the popular mind. The knowledge 

 that the best part of our universe is hidden from the " unassisted 

 sight," and that the " music of the spheres " is altogether unheard by 

 the ordinary ear, warns the botanist of possible and serious error 

 in the common estimate of the plant. Locked up within the tissues 

 of the living plant wherever found, and of whatever rank the plant 

 may be, the microscope, for example, discloses the curious 

 "protoplasm," through the substance of which never-ending currents 

 and tides are seen to pass. The busy streams that course up and 

 down the microscopic stinging hair of the nettle-leaf, and the tides 

 that throng the tissues of the lordly oak or giant Sequoia itself, show 

 clearly enough that, whatever plant-life may appear to the ordinary 

 observer, the stillness of the forest is after all more apparent than 

 real. Each plant is thus, at the very outset of the botanist's studies 

 in the minute, discovered to be the seat of vital activities of highly 

 complex order. It is through these protoplasmic currents that the 

 life of the plant is maintained, and it is by means of these hidden 

 activities that the various known aspects of plant-life are manifested. 

 The production of the embryo-plant, its gradual formation into the 

 likeness of the young organism, the production of the leaf and flower, 

 the mysterious fertilisation of the ovule, and the appearance of fruit 

 and seed as the final terms in the " ages " of the plant, are each and 

 all wrought out by means of the activities of its protoplasm. 

 Erasmus Darwin, writing in his day of the life of plants, says : 



Thus, while the vegetable tribes inhale 

 The limpid water from the parent vale, 

 Their vegetating organs decompose 

 The salutary compound as it flows ; 

 And by affinities unknown dispart 

 The subtle hydrogen with chemic art, 

 To blend it with the carbon of the air, 

 And form the rose, the pink, the lily fair. 



Had that eminent philosopher been acquainted with the physio- 

 logy of plants as that topic is understood by us to-day, he would 

 have been enabled to refer his "affinities unknown " to the powers 

 of the living matter which, as we have seen, makes each plant, appa- 

 rently inert and stable, the repository of ceaseless action. On the 

 very threshold of botanical science, then, we discover that it is neces- 

 sary to prepare ourselves for a sweeping change of ideas regarding 

 the inner life of plants. It may, in fact, be laid down as a rule, desti- 



