Sensation in Vegetables. 139 



Some may say that the fundamental idea in the paper 

 shows a touch of genius, and to this we might have agreed 

 had we not known that it has occurred to many young 

 sympathetic minds. Several have tried to give it a place 

 in scientific thought. We remember it as a natural out- 

 growth of our childhood, when untaught by any one we 

 stopped the process of cutting a branch lest perhaps it felt 

 pain, an idea nourished in us afterwards by Virgil, who 

 learnt it from a long line of literary ancestors by fairy tales 

 from various nations, including ancient Egypt ; but many 

 ideas require no ancestors except the germs existing not 

 solely as bodies, but as the peculiar movements of bodies 

 in human blood. 



As we write this we think of sacred trees, and bleeding 

 bushes, trees in which lived Hamadryads, or trees which 

 live and die with chosen individuals. The whole world 

 has been given a soul as early as Plato, and Pantheism puts 

 this soul everywhere ; but to approach it as a naturalist 

 shows a change of aspect of the question and a certain 

 amount of boldness if Dr. Percival really did approach it of 

 his own impulse ; had he read Adamson for example ? It 

 would appear as if he had not, and he seems not to have 

 read Dr. George Bell's essay, which however was printed 

 afterwards in the same volume. We shall bring an extract 

 from it before Percival's paper. 



Dr. Bell's article ' On the Physiology of Plants,' vol. ii. 

 p. 394, was written previous to Percival's, and published in 

 Edinburgh 1777, as a Latin thesis. It was translated by 

 Dr. Currie and published in these Memoirs ; he says 



' The analogy between vegetables and animals, which 

 was formerly pointed out, gives a reasonable presumption 



