Without entering on the difficult question of 'spontaneous motion', or, in
other words, on the difference between vegetable and animal life, we would
remark, that if nature had endowed us with microscopic powers of vision, and
the integuments of plants had been rendered perfectly transparent to our
eyes, the vegetable world would present a very different aspect from the
apparent immobility and repose in which it is now manifested to our senses.
The interior portion of the cellular structure of their organs is
incessantly animated by the most varied currents, either rotating, ascending
and descending, remifying, and ever changing their direction, as manifested
in the motion of the granular mucus of marine plants (Naiades, Characeae,
Hydrocharidae), and in the hairs of phanerogamic land plants; in the
molecular motion first discovered by the illustrious botanist Robert Brown,
and which may be traced in the ultimate portions of every molecule of
matter, even when separated from the organ; in the gyratory currents of the
globules of cambium ('cyclosis') circulating in their peculiar vessels; and,
finally, in the singularly articulated self-unrolling filamentous vessels in
the antheridia of the chara, and in the reproductive organs of liverworts
and algae, in the structural conditions of which Meyen, unhappily too early
lost to science, believed that he recognized an analogy with the spermatozoa
of the animal kingdom.
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