which so excite our wonder be regarded as survivals of ancestral habits, or
as comparatively late acquirements, or even as special endowments, in any
case what we have now learned of them goes to strengthen the conclusion that
the whole organic world is akin.

The volume upon "The Movements and Habits of Climbing Plants" is a revised
and enlarged edition of a memoir communicated to the Linnaean Society in
1865, and published in the ninth volume of its Journal. There was an extra
impression, but, beyond the circle of naturalists, it can hardly have been
much known at first-hand. Even now, when it is made a part of the general
Darwinian literature, it is unlikely to be as widely read as the companion
volume which we have been reviewing; although it is really a more readable
book, and well worthy of far more extended notice at our hands than it can
now receive. The reason is obvious. It seems as natural that plants should
climb as it does unnatural that any should take animal food. Most people,
knowing that some plants "twine with the sun," and others "against the
sun," have an idea that the sun in some way causes the twining; indeed, the
notion is still fixed in the popular mind that the same species twines in
opposite directions north and south of the equator.

Readers of this fascinating treatise will learn, first of all, that the sun
has no influence over such movements directly, and that its indirect
influence is commonly adverse or disturbing, except the heat, which
quickens vegetable as it does animal life. Also, that climbing is
accomplished by powers and actions as unlike those generally predicated of
the vegetable kingdom as any which have been brought to view in the
preceding volume. Climbing plants "feel" as well as "grow and live;" and
they also manifest an automatism which is perhaps more wonderful than a
response by visible movement to an external irritation. Nor do plants grow
up their supports, as is unthinkingly supposed; for, although only growing