THE BEGINNINGS OF LIFE. 105 



feet plants 1 whenever they may happen to be brought 

 into contact with suitable external conditions, we must 

 presume that, either (i) during this long lapse of cen- 

 turies the 'vital principle' of the plant has been 

 imprisoned in the most dreary and impenetrable of 

 dungeons, whither no sister effluences from the general 

 c soul of nature ' could affect it, and whence escape was 

 impossible; or else (2) that the germ of the future 

 possible living plant is there only in the form of an 

 inherited structure whose molecular complexities are 

 of such a kind that, after moisture has restored mobi- 

 lity to its atoms, its potential life may pass into actual 

 life, because the ever-recurring ethereal pulses of motion, 

 and other changes in its environment, are capable of 

 giving rise to a definite series of simultaneous and 

 successive changes in its own structure. This series 

 of actions and re-actions most variously complex 

 though they may be constitute the essential phenomena 

 of Life, and the structure of the organism or living 

 thing manifesting them is but the material embodi- 

 ment resulting from such actions. 



1 In connection with periods of rest in Plant life, Alex. Braun (Re- 

 juvenescence in Nature, Syd. Soc. 1853, p. 200, et seq.) makes some very 

 interesting remarks. We will extract the following sentences only: 

 ' The formation of fixed oil is intimately connected with that of starch 

 in the economy of cell-life ; its appearance, in like manner, announces 

 the repose of age in cell-life, its disappearance the beginning of Re- 

 juvenescence. We meet with fixed oil in the cells, either mixed with 

 starch, substituted for it, or gradually displacing it; its occurrence is 

 perhaps still more general than that of starch, since it exists even in the 

 Fungi and Phycochromiferous Algae,' 



