176 NATURAL HISTORY SOCIETY OF DUBLIN. 



To say (with Schenk and many others) that there is no actual dis- 

 tinction between the animal and vegetable kingdom, whatever may be 

 intended to be thereby conveyed, so far as I can see, is simply to say 

 that a germ or partially developed organism may go on to find itself, 

 when matured, at random, or as chance or circumstances may direct, 

 either an animal or a plant, that is, that it is at one time an animal, at 

 another a plant, or vice versa. If people confined themselves to saying 

 that certain phases in the development or history of certain organisms 

 belonging to either kingdom are sometimes very difficult indeed, nay 

 with our present limited acquaintance with them, perhaps impossible, to 

 distinguish from similar phases of certain other organisms belonging to 

 the other kingdom, then acquiescence becomes a matter of course. Tor, 

 as I venture to think, it is only the development of an organism from 

 its germ until it in turn reproduces its germs — its origin and destiny — 

 the nature of its ultimate fructification — what it grew from, and what 

 it ends in — its tout ensemble, in fact — and no isolated or single phase or 

 temporary condition in the course of its development, even though pro- 

 tracted, that can decide the point as to its true nature. So far as I can 

 at present see, the fallacy seems to me to lie in the assumption that a 

 correct diagnosis as to the plant or animal nature of any organism ought 

 to be made in a moment, at any given stage upon which we accidentally 

 alight. It is true, indeed, that of very many of these doubtful or uncer- 

 tain organisms, as they ordinarily present themselves to us, the life- 

 history — the beginning and the end — is as yet very imperfectly known ; 

 upon such it would, of course, be premature to attempt to decide ; nor 

 can I see that such cases militate against the view here sougbt to be 

 expressed. 



" Non semper ea sunt, quae videntur, decipit 

 Frons prima multos" — 



is doubtless oftentimes as true of many of these lowly beings, in their 

 way, as it is of men. 



Unger, with the so-called cell- circulation in the vegetable, as well as 

 the movements executed by ciliated zoospores, in his mind's eye, ex- 

 pressed himself thus — " The animal nature is in the plant, as it were, 

 caged" — as if he would say, as it were, tbat if it could only escape its 

 thraldom, it would be an animal. He would doubtless have considered 

 himself doubly fortified in this view, had he known that a protoplasmic 

 vegetable mass can (and does occasionally) assume an actually reptant 

 amoeboid state. But I do not see that such a view is in truth justified, 

 so far at least as present knowledge goes. That a plant is a plant, and 

 an animal is an animal throughout, we must I think certainly as yet 

 hold, notwithstanding that certain phases of the one may under certain 

 circumstances temporarily simulate certain phases of the other. I con- 

 ceive that we must, in our present state of knowledge, continue to believe 

 that these free amoeba-like reptant masses of vegetable protoplasm can- 

 not, any more than the isolated motile ciliated zoospores or spermatozoids, 

 be of animal nature ; for — although, for a while, with more points in 



