6lO PHILOSOPHICAL TRANSACTIONS. [aNNO 1742. 



The same observation, and daily experience, make it also familiar to us, that 

 besides the first way of propagating vegetables from their respective fruit and 

 seed, they are also propagated from cuttings; and every one knows, that a twig 

 of a willow particularly, cut off and only stuck into the ground, presently takes 

 root and grows, and becomes as much a real and perfect tree, as the original 

 one from which it was first taken. 



Here is then, in the vegetable kingdom, the very thing quite common, that 

 M. Reaumur's memoir is said to give a rare example of in the animal. The 

 best philosophers have long observed very strong analogies between these two 

 classes of beings: and the moderns, as they have penetrated farther into nature, 

 have every day found reason to extend that analogy; some have even with great 

 probability talked of a scale of nature, in which she, by an insensible transi- 

 tion, passed from the most perfect of animals, not only to the most imperfect, 

 and thence to the most imperfect of vegetables, but even through coralline 

 bodies, and minerals, to the very earths and stones, which seem the most ina- 

 nimate parts of our globe. 



Now in such a scale, who is the man that will be bold to say, just here ani- 

 mal life entirely ends, and here vegetable life begins? or, just thus far, and no 

 farther, one sort of operation goes, and just here another sort quite different 

 takes its place? or, again, who will venture to say, life in every animal is a 

 thing absolutely different from that which we dignify by the same name in every 

 vegetable ? And might not a man even be excused, if he should modestly doubt, 

 whether plants and vegetables may not themselves be considered as a very low 

 and imperfect tribe of animals; as animals might, in like manner, be consi- 

 dered as a more perfect and exalted kind of vegetables? 



We see the two sexes of male and female run through all the higher parts of 

 the animal creation; yet would he have gone a great deal too far, who should 

 have thence asserted, there were no exceptions to this general economy; or 

 that this was one of the general and distinguishing affections of all the animal 

 kind: for modern discoveries have informed us, that there is somewhat very 

 analogous to this in the vegetable creation also; and even in the animal it has 

 been found, that snails, earthworms, and some others, are really herma- 

 phrodites, having in themselves the organs of both sexes: while the working 

 bee is truly of no sex at all, nor anywise employed in the production of that 

 species, it labours so hard daily to provide with food. 



But whereas in animals, the division of the sexes is almost general ; and the 

 union of them in one subject appears but in a few instances; contrarywise, in 

 vegetables, almost all have the whole apparatus of generation in each individual, 

 while only a few sorts seem to emulate animals in what is analogous to the divi- 

 sion of them. 



