THE VEGETABLE KINGDOM. 471 



an allusion to the system of these two botanists which is 

 full of poetry and freshness. He draws the picture of a 

 rose so weakened and languishing that the least breath 

 of air, as light as the sigh of a virgin, tears away the 

 suffering and faded petals. And when the murderous 

 breath has at last slain the flower formerly so .sweet and 

 perfumed, the gnomes, with tears, bear away its soul to 

 paradise on their diaphanous wings. 



On the other hand, as the genius of Descartes was 

 powerful enough to make the bulk of men believe that 

 animals were only simple automatons, set going in order 

 to accomplish a certain number of acts, so many naturalists, 

 on still more plausible grounds, and in particular Hales, 

 whose beautiful experiments laid the foimdation of vege- 

 table physiology, leaned strongly to the view of consider- 

 ing plants as so many structures absolutely under the 

 empire of material forces. 



But neither the daring of the Cartesians nor the hypo- 

 theses of the Animists find an asylum at the present 

 day in the severe domain of science. We cannot liken 

 the j^henomena of vegetable life either to simple physico- 

 chemical action, or to a supreme intellectual directing 

 power. It is evident that they are governed by a vital 

 force which binds all the springs of existence; when that 

 disappears, nothing preserves the plant from destruction. 



All naturalists who have treated the question seriously 

 as physiologists, maintain that plants enjoy quite as active 

 a life as many animals, and that they possess traces of 

 sensibility and contractility. Bichat, the most illustrious 

 of modern anatomists, in his magnificent liedierdies sur la 

 Vie et la Mort, admits this without hesitation. 



Numerous experiments prove clearly that there are in 

 plants traces of sensibility analogous to animal sensibility. 



60 



