EVOLUTION OF LIFE. 55 



The means by which the end is obtained is 

 not confined to one, but often extends to seve- 

 ral modes, and the offspring produced is per- 

 fect in all its parts ; whether it has been evolved 

 from a bulb, or from a bud ; from a single leaf, 

 or from the seed itself. It does not, however, 

 appear from any knowledge which we possess, 

 that vegetables have any organs, either of sense, 

 or of consciousness, with which animals, in 

 general, are endowed. 



When we behold the blossom o"f the sun- 

 flower following the beams of the sun, from 

 east to west; the dioncsa muscipula seizing flies 

 by the contraction of its leaves, and making 

 them prisoners ; the sensitive plant becoming 

 tremulous and irritable throughout the whole of 

 its frame, when impressions are made on any of 

 its parts ; when various other plants have 

 their corolla opened and expanded, contracted 

 and closed, at particular periods of the day and 

 night, as well as under particular states of tem- 

 perature in the atmosphere ; I may, perhaps, 

 be permitted to assert, that these effects are not 

 the offspring of the living principle alone, but, 

 on the contrary, that they must proceed from 

 some small degree of sensitive power which 

 they may possibly possess, (consequently re- 

 siding in a nerve, or something analogous to it, 

 as the organ alone which is appropriated to 

 fulfil that office,) resembling the faculty which 



