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SECT. XIII.
OF VEGETABLE ANIMATION.
I. 1. Vegetables are irritable, mimosa, dionaea muscipula. Vegetable 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 pos|sess 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 stig|mas 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 exter|nal things?
I. 1. THE fibres of the vegetable world, as well as those of the animal, are excitable into a variety of motion by the irritations of ex|ternal objects. This appears particularly in the mimosa or sensitive plant, whose leaves contract on the slightest injury; the dionaea mus|cipula, 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