president’s address. 
493 
that they are capable of experiencing sensations, and that the 
more we study plants the more impressed we are with the con- 
viction that we have in 'them a line of development paralileil to our 
own, but one situated in a lower plane, whose scale is pitched in 
a lower key. I quote a few paragraphs from Mr. Nubtall’s 
attractive article. 
“Of late years the student probing deeper and deeper into the 
mysteries of plant life has been increasingly struck with the 
analogies that exist between the plant and the animal kingdoms. 
Over and over again in his researches among plants animal-like 
characteristics confront him in so persistent and surprising a way 
that the conviction is forced upon him that, beneath the wide 
divergences that undoubtedly exist between the two kingdoms, 
there must be some fundamental term common to both. The liv- 
ing plant and the living animal, remote as they appear to be in 
their highest developments, must still be bound together by some 
subtle link. And reflection shows him that that lank can be noth- 
ing else than the possession of the indefinable quality, life. That 
which he calls ‘life’ he realizes must be of the same nature and 
quality in both kingdoms, and the distinction between them lies, 
he is beginning to assert, merely in variation as to the quality and 
intensity of that possession. Indeed it has been suggestively re- 
marked that ‘life sleeps in the plant, but wakes and works in the 
animal.’ 
“Now when we look down the long vista of the animal world 
from the highest ito the lowest our glance passes from man to 
apes, past birds and reptiles, fishes and frogs, on by worms and 
insects and jelly fish, and past the animal communities that we 
call coralis and sponges, until finally we come to the end of the line 
and find the simplest form of animal life to be merely a mass (of 
living protoplasm enclosed by a more or less definite wall, though 
still exhibiting certain characteristics of an animal. 
“And when we change our point of view to the plant world a 
similar vista of complex forms successively simplifying meets our 
eye as we range from chestnut and lily, pines and ferns, to 
mosses, liverworts fungi, seaweeds and green algae, Until alt 
length we come to the simple plants which are also merely a mass 
of living protoplasm invested with a cell wall, though still en- 
