840 ORGANIC LIFE, 



and animal life, it may be remarked that if nature had 

 endowed us with a microscopic power of vision, and if the 

 integuments of plants had been perfectly transparent, the 

 vegetable kingdom would be far from presenting to us that 

 aspect of immobility and repose which our perceptions now 

 ascribe to it. The internal parts of the cellular structure are 

 incessantly animated by the most various currents : ascending 

 and descending, rotating, ramifying, and continually changing 

 their direction, they manifest themselves by the move- 

 ments of a granular mucilaginous fluid in water plants 

 (naiades, characese, hydrocharidese), and in the hairs of phe- 

 nogamous land plants, Such is the peculiar molecular 

 movement discovered by the great botanist Robert Brown 

 (which is indeed perceptible, not only in vegetables, but also 

 in all matter reduced to an extreme state of division) ; 

 such is the gyratory current (cyclose) of globules of 

 cambium; and, lastly, such are the articulated filamen- 

 tary cells which unroll themselves in the antherides of 

 the chara, and in the reproductive organs of liverworts 

 and algse, and in which Meyen, too early lost to science, 

 believed that he recognised an analogy to the spermatozoa 

 of the animal kingdom. If we add to these various currents 

 and molecular agitations the phenomena of endosmose, 

 the processes of nutrition and of growth, and internal 

 currents of air or gases, we shall have some idea of the powers 

 which, almost unknown to us, are incessantly in action m 

 the apparently still life of the vegetable kingdom. 



Since the time when, in an earlier work (" Ansichten der 

 Natur," "Tableaux de la Nature"), I attempted to describe 

 the universal diffusion of organic life on the surface of the 



