THE PRESIDENT’S ADDRESS. 175 
and squeeze it to death.” This description, indeed, has not been 
confirmed in all its details by later observations, but it expresses 
very vividly the general type of the plant’s capturing apparatus. 
The point to which Dr. Hooker drew attention was the singular 
proof herein afforded of a fundamental similarity between the 
protoplasm of plants and the protoplasm of animals. Jf both 
can in some instances draw their nutriment from the same food, so 
that the usual order of things is inverted, and animals are made 
food for vegetables, instead of vegetables for animals, then these 
phenomena of carnivorous plants may find their place as one more 
link in the continuity of Nature. 
In turning aside from this to different topics, I would simply 
allude, in passing, to the steady progress of. observation by the 
Spectrum Analysis, and to the attention which Astronomers are 
paying to the complicated subject of Solar Physics. The great 
centre of our Astronomical system is receiving from all quarters 
examination into its Mass and surrounding conditions, which cannot 
fail to modify and yet advance the science of the Sun; and from 
the great central body forth into space there are advancing dis- 
coveries of extreme interest and importance. One of the.most 
remarkable of these is the settlement of the fact, that meteors, 
shooting-stars, and erolites have taken their place among the 
attendants of the Sun, whereas we had been in the habit of looking 
upon their phenomena as meteorological and not astronomical. 
There was not much to attract attention to these bodies when they 
were supposed to form one or two rings occuping a position in 
space very nearly coincident with that of the Earth’s orbit. But 
it has now been placed beyond a doubt that the Earth encounters 
fifty-six systems at least of these small bodies; and these systems 
are found (in the instances as yet examined) not circular rings, but 
ovals of great eccentricity extending far into space, in some cases 
even beyond the orbits of Uranus and Neptune. Nor is this all. 
It is supposed to be extremely probable, nay, certain, that such 
systems are to be reckoned, not by tens, or fifties, or even hundreds 
and thousands, but by millions upon millions. So it seems, that 
the interplanetary spaces, so far from being looked upon as un- 
tenanted, except by an occasional wandering comet, must be 
considered as crowded with various forms of cosmical matter. If 
an eye, armed with powers of sufficient vision, and placed at 
some far-distant point could only see at one glance all the systems 
