4 L' ; \ GENERAL BOTANY 



at any rate as the plants and animals that we can see 

 with our eyes are concerned, are so distinct that it is 

 difficult to believe that they are in any way connected. 

 Animals move from place to place in search of food ; 

 plants are fixed in the ground. Plants are green, or 

 rather they have green leaves, while animals are seldom 

 green but may be of almost any other colour, red, yellow, 

 brown, black or white. This distinction, though it may 

 seem to be trivial enough, is really, as we shall see 

 later, of very great and fundamental importance. And 

 in their general form or shape animals and plants seem 

 to be constructed on different plans. There is a sym- 

 metry about an animal's body which is absent in the case 

 of plants. In external appearance the right and left 

 sides of most animals are exactly the same. A bird, for 

 instance, has a wing on each side, a horse, dog or cow 

 two legs on each side. With smaller animals we find 

 the limbs, even where, as in the centipede, there are a 

 very large number, arranged evenly on either side of 

 the body, while the head and the tail are exactly in 

 the middle line. But in a plant there is none of this 

 symmetry. Its leaves indeed are generally all alike, 

 and its flowers are not only all alike, but each in 

 itself is symmetrical about some line, but plants of the 

 same kind have not all the same number of branches 

 and some may be developed more on one side than 

 on the other, for external circumstances influence the 

 general shape very much. In their method of feeding 

 and in their internal structure animals and plants are 

 also entirely distinct. There is, for instance, in a plant 

 nothing to correspond to the stomach or to the heart 

 of an animal, but of this we shall learn more later on. 



