CLIMBING PLANTS 201 



Habits of Climbing Plants, published in 1865, and then 

 in his larger work on the Power of Movement in Plants, 

 published in 1880, a work which, though not perhaps 

 so popular or so well known as some of his other works, 

 yet shows, I think, almost more than any other, his un- 

 tiring patience in observation, and his wonderful power 

 of drawing out great principles from the most minute 

 and (to others) insignificant properties of organic life. 



I must note, also, an interesting point connected with 

 the philology of climbing plants. In America all 

 climbing plants are called vines ; and it sounds strange 

 to us to see the name given to such different things as 

 the vine, the Wistaria, the clematis, the ivy, the honey 

 suckle, the scarlet runner, etc. But the name is not 

 a modem Americanism, and I am inclined to think 

 (though I cannot prove it for certain) that the airly 

 settlers brought it from England. 1 The writers of the 

 sixteenth and seventeenth centuries called many plants 

 vines; and Halliwell, in his Dictionary of Archaic Word*, 

 says that vine is the name for 'any trailing plant bear- 

 ing fruit,' but he gives no authority for the statement. 

 "We have, however, a record of it in the old plant- 

 names white vine, wild vine, wood vine, blood vine, 

 hedge vine, Isle of Wight vine, etc. 



1 'Vine' is so used in 2 Kings iv. 39: 'found a wild vine, and 

 gathered thereof wild gourds. ' 



