secretions._ 2. _Vegetable buds are inferior animals, are liable to
greater or less irritability._ II. _Stamens and pistils of plants shew
marks of sensibility._ III. _Vegetables possess some degree of
volition._ IV. _Motions of plants are associated like those of
animals._ V. 1. _Vegetable structure like that of animals, their
anthers and stigmas are living creatures. Male-flowers of Vallisneria._
2. _Whether vegetables, possess ideas? They have organs of sense as of
touch and smell, and ideas of external things?_

I. 1. The fibres of the vegetable world, as well as those of the animal,
are excitable into a variety of motion by irritations of external objects.
This appears particularly in the mimosa or sensitive plant, whose leaves
contract on the slightest injury; the dionæa muscipula, which was lately
brought over from the marshes of America, presents us with another curious
instance of vegetable irritability; its leaves are armed with spines on
their upper edge, and are spread on the ground around the stem; when an
insect creeps on any of them in its passage to the flower or seed, the leaf
shuts up like a steel rat-trap, and destroys its enemy. See Botanic Garden,
Part II. note on Silene.

The various secretions of vegetables, as of odour, fruit, gum, resin, wax,
honey, seem brought about in the same manner as in the glands of animals;
the tasteless moisture of the earth is converted by the hop-plant into a
bitter juice; as by the caterpillar in the nut-shell the sweet kernel is
converted into a bitter powder. While the power of absorption in the roots
and barks of vegetables is excited into action by the fluids applied to
their mouths like the lacteals and lymphatics of animals.

2. The individuals of the vegetable world may be considered as inferior or
less perfect animals; a tree is a congeries of many living buds, and in