36 HABITUDES 



tinental cryptogamists, admits that the location, rather 

 than the structure of these plants, affords a final distinc- 

 tion, and that, while the lichens live on dry and scanty 

 soils, and algae in water, salt or fresh, the fungi occupy 

 1 the intermediate place, loving a damp and unsound or 

 loaded atmosphere, and feeding on organized matter, the 

 vitality of which is gone, or going. 



In all of them, the element is a very minute cell, not 

 often distinguishable when isolated, from the elementary 

 cells of, even animal organisms. Indeed, some of the con- 

 fervas, obviously vegetable in one state of existence, as 

 the arthrodiese, offer in another, the plainest character of 

 animal life; supposing that animal life is to be inferred 

 from motions indicating a well-marked power of volition. 

 Some of the oscillarias have an oscillatory movement ex- 

 tremely active and perceptible, and the ulva labyrinthi- 

 formis and anabaina, with all the other conditions of a 

 vegetable, have, according to Vauquelin and Chaptal, all 

 the chemical characters of an animal. We have, there- 

 fore, chemically constituted plants with animal motions 

 and volition; and those of animal composition, with the 

 exclusive habitudes and structure of vegetables. 



All plants are liable to curious and often great altera- 

 tions by climate, soil, and season; but the dubious beings 

 I am now describing, undergo such astonishing modifica- 

 tions, even by the slightest causes, as to perplex, by their 

 morphology, the sagacity of the best informed naturalists. 

 They, at least the simplest of them, seem to have so little 

 inherent tendency to the assumption of form and nutri- 

 tion, as to take their shape and products almost exclu- 

 sively from the hand of accident. "One might call it," 

 says Lindley, "a provisional creation, waiting to be or- 

 ganized, and then assuming different forms, according to 



