PLANTS. 2oS 



ccutrary, after shooting at first upwards, turn dowu. Of 

 this extraordinary vegetable fact, an account has lately 

 been attempted to be given. " The plumule," it is said, " is 

 stimulated by the air into action, and elongates itself when 

 it is thus most excited ; the radicle is stimulated by moii^t- 

 ure, and elongates itself when it is thus most excited. 

 Whence one of these grows upward in quest of its adapted 

 object, and the other downward."^' Were this account Det- 

 ter verified by experiment than it is, it only shifts the con- 

 trivance. It does not disprove the contrivance ; it only re- 

 moves it a little further back. Who, "k) use our author's 

 own language, ''adai^ted the objects?" Who gave such a 

 quahty to these connate parts, as to be susceptible of differ- 

 ent "stimulation ;' as to be "excited" each only by its own 

 element, and precisely by that which the success of the veg- 

 etation requires ? I say, " which the success of the vegeta 

 tion requires," for the toil of the husbandman would haw 

 been in vain, his laborious and expensive preparation of the 

 ground in vain, if the event must, after all, depend upon the 

 position in which the scattered seed was sown. Not one 

 seed out of a hundred would fall in a right direction. 



Our second observation is upon a general property of 

 climbing plants, which is strictly mechanical. In these 

 plants, from each knot or joint, or as botanists call it, axilla, 

 of the plant, issue, close to each other, two shoots, one bear- 

 ing the flower and fruit, the other drawn out into a wire, 

 a long, tapering, spiral tendril, that twists itself round any 

 thing which lies within its reach. Considering that in this 

 class two purposes are to be provided for, and together — 

 fructification and support, the fruitage of the plant and the 

 sustentation of the stalk — what means could be used mor«! 

 ctTectual, or, as I have said, more mechanical, than what 

 this structure presents to our eyes ? Why, or how, without 

 a view to this double purpose, do two shoots, of such differ- 

 ent and appropriate forms, spring from the same joint, from 

 * Darwin's Phytologia, p. 144. 



