ANNOTATIONS AND ADDITIONS. 259 



home, being brought to Europe fell asleep the first year on the 

 setting in of winter." This torpidity or enfeeblement of tha vital 

 functions and vital activity passes through several gradations, accord- 

 ing as it extends to the processes of nutrition, respiration, and mus- 

 cular motion, or to depression of the activity of the brain and nervous 

 system. The winter-sleep of the solitary bears and of the badger 

 is not accompanied by any rigidity, and hence the reawakening of 

 these animals is so easy, and, as was often related to me in Siberia, 

 so dangerous to the hunters and country people. The first recogni- 

 tion of the gradation and connection of these phenomena leads us up 

 to what has been called the tc vita minima" of the microscopic or- 

 ganisms, which, occasionally with green ovaries and undergoing the 

 process of spontaneous division, fall from the clouds in the Atlantic 

 sand-rain. The apparent revivification of Rotiferae, as well as of the 

 silicious-shelled Infusoria, is only the renewal of long-enfeebled vital 

 functions a state of vitality which was never entirely extinct, and 

 which is fanned into a fresh flame, or excited anew, by the appro- 

 priate stimulus. Physiological phenomena can only be compre- 

 hended by being traced throughout the entire series of analogous 

 modifications. 



(*) p. 228. "Winged insects." 



Formerly the fertilization of flowers in which the sexes are sepa- 

 rated was ascribed principally to the action of the wind : it has been 

 shown by Kblreuter, and with great ingenuity by Sprengel, that 

 bees, wasps, and a host of smaller winged insects, are the chief 

 agents. I say the chief agents, because to assert that no fertilization 

 is possible without the intervention of these little animals appears to 

 me not to be in conformity with nature, as indeed has been shown 

 in detail by Willdenow. (Grundriss der Kr'auterkunde, 4te Aufl., 

 Berl. 1805, s. 405-412.) On the other hand, Dichogamy, colored 

 spots or marks indicating honey-vessels (maculae indicantes), and 

 fertilization by insects, are, in much the greater number of cases, 

 inseparably associated. (Compare Auguste de St. Hilaire, Legons de 

 Botanique, 1840, pp. 565-571.) 



The statement which has been often repeated since Spallanzani, 

 that the dioecious common hemp (Cannabis sativa) yields perfect 



