774 ON PLANTS IN RELATION TO ANIMALS. 
“ We may mention some interesting observations and draw¬ 
ing made by Mrs. Godwin Austin on this subject, first ex¬ 
hibited at the meeting of the British Association in 1849, and 
afterwards published in Henfrey’s Botanical Gazette for 
March, 1850. It was a happy idea of the great German 
poet-botanist, Goethe, to reduce the previously received and 
complicated theory of plant structure to the simple formula 
of leaf formation. In this way everything presented itself to 
him under a different aspect; what had been considered 
essential became accidental, and vice versa. In all the higher 
plants foliage, flowers, and fruit were formerly regarded as 
essentially different parts. It was Goethe who first recog¬ 
nised in the flowers and fruit the recurrence of the foliage, 
so that there is no essential difference between these three 
parts of a plant. 
“ In studying this subject somewhat carefully, it becomes 
evident that it is the leaf which, in its Protean capability of 
transformation, gradually assumes the form of fruit or flower. 
These are truly leaves, whorls of leaves differing in charac¬ 
ter and position from other leaves, although not in their 
essential nature. This great doctrine of unity of plan of 
creation was first demonstrated and successfully taught in 
relation to the vegetable kingdom, and has since been clearly 
worked out and adopted by the ablest comparative anatomists 
of this and other countries, as applied to higher organisms, 
and even to man himself. The susceptibility of the little 
trifolium to the withdrawal of light, and its habit of closing 
its leaves somewhat on the approach of light, remind us of 
its family relationship to the group of sensitive plants. The 
observations of the older botanists led them to record this 
curious fact, and Gerarde tells us that f Pliny writeth and 
setteth it down for certaine that the leaves hereof do tremble 
and stand upright against the coming of a storme or 
tempest. 
“ While examining the tissue of the stems of a plant under 
the microscope the abundance of spiral fibre suggested the 
thought that this very elastic and delicate material might 
possibly have something to do with the hitherto unexplained 
cause of the curious movements of sensitive plants. Micro¬ 
scopic research, in skilful hands, will do much to clear up 
these unsolved questions/’* 
Our second plant, the strawberry-headed trefoil, receives 
its name from the peculiarly enlarged calyx, which, as the 
corolla begins to wither, enlarges to such an extent that the 
# ‘Sowerby’s English Botany/ by G. T. B. Syme, Esq. 
