Sense-Life and Sensibility 
plasmic matter crossed the walls and kept up some sort 
of communication between cell and cell. 
These little living threads are certainly not nerves in 
the ordinary sense of the word, but they may function, 
for aught we know to the contrary, as a rudimentary 
- nervous system. The way in which they occur, very 
generally in young unspecialised tissues, and in all parts 
of the plants, makes one inclined to suspect that this is so. 
We have no knowledge as to how nerves really 
convey a message, and after all what are nerves but 
modified and highly specialised protoplasm ? 
No satisfactory chemical difference has yet been dis- 
covered which clearly separates vegetable and animal 
protoplasm. But the reader must be referred to Dr. 
Francis Darwin’s address} for an authoritative and yet 
most interesting discussion of this difficult matter. 
Acertain German professor, Gustave Theodor Fechner, 
published in 1848 a very remarkable work entitled 
“Nanna” or “Upon the Soul-life of Plants.” A new 
edition has lately been produced by Kurd Lasswitz, 
Hamburg and Leipzig, 1908.’ 
It is very difficult to say whether or not this work 
was intended to be taken quite seriously. Some of his 
sallies are lyrical enthusiasms which were obviously not 
to be understood in a purely literal sense. 
Humour takes very strange forms at times, and 
this is especially true of its German equivalent. Some 
of Fechner’s critics, and especially Schrammen,? have 
perhaps taken the eloquence of Fechner much too 
critically and seriously. 
It is full of blunders, “howlers” of the most dis- 
tressing character, as, for example, when he compares 
the spirally wound threads in some stem-vessels to the 
nerves of animals, 
As he says in another place: “The plant is ever the 
Iq! 
