BUFFON— FULLER QUOTATIONS. 137 



are, so to speak, torn up by the roots and wounded all 

 together, and at their source. 



" In further proof that the brain is neither the centre 

 of perception nor the seat of the sensations, I may remind 

 the reader that animals and even children have been 

 born without heads and brains, and have yet had feeling, 

 movement, and life. There are also whole classes of 

 animals, like insects and worms, with a brain that is by 

 no means a distinct mass nor of sensible volume, but 

 with only something which corresponds with the medvlla 

 oblongata and the spinal marrow. There would be more 

 reason, then, in placing the seat of the feelings and per- 

 ceptions in the spinal marrow, which no animal is 

 without, than in the brain which is not an organ 

 common to all creatures that can feel." 



If Buffon's ideas concerning the brain are as just as 

 they appear to be, the resemblance between plants and 

 animals is more close than is apparent, even to a super- 

 ficial observer, on a first inspection of the phenomena. 

 Such an observer, hoWever, on looking but a little more 

 intently, will see the higher vertebrata as perambulating 

 vegetables planted upside down. So the man who had 

 been born blind, on being made to see, and on looking 

 at the objects before him with unsophisticated eyes, said 

 without hesitation that he saw " men as trees walking," 

 thus seeing with more prophetic insight than either he 

 or the bystanders could interpret. For our skull is as 

 a kind of flower-pot, and holds the soil from which we 

 spring, that is to say the brain ; our mouth and stomach 

 are roots, in two stories or stages ; our bones are the 

 trellis-work to which we cling while going about in 



