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Show XI. INSECTIVOROUS AND CLIMBING PLANTS. • (Tm: NATION, Ja1'1/Ua1'y 6 and 13, 1876.) "MINERALS grow; vegetables grow and live; animals grow, live, and feel;" this is the well-worn, not to say out-worn, diagnosis of the three kingdoms by Linnreus: It must be said of it that the agreement indicated in the first coupl~t is unreal, and that the distinction declared in the second is evanescent. Crystals do not grow at all in the sense that plants and animals grow. On the other hand, if a response to external impressions by special movements is evidence of feeling, vegetables share this endowment with animals; while, if conscious feeling is meant, this can be affirmed only of the higher animals. What appears to remain true is, that the difference is one of successive addition. That the increment in the organic world is of many steps; that in the long series no absolute 1 "Insectivorous Plants. By Charles Darwin, M.A., F. R. 8." With lllustrations. London: John Murray. 1875. Pp. 462. New York: D. Appleton & Co. "The Move~ents and Habits of Climbing Plants. By Charles Darwin, M.A., F.R.S., etc." Second Edition, revised, with Illustrations. London: John Murray. 1875. Pp. 208. New York: D. Appleton & . Co. · INSECTIVOROUS AND CLIMBING PLANTS. 309 lin~s separate, or have always separated, organisms whwh barely respond to impressions from those which more active1y and variously respond, and even from those that consciously so respond-this as we alllmow I.S wh at the author of the works befo'r e us has under-' taken to demonstrate. Without reference here either to that part of the series with which man is connected an d I. n some sense <?r other forms a part of, or to that' lower limbo where the two organic kingdoms apparently merge-or whence, in evolutionary phrase, they have emerged-Mr. Darwin, in the present volumes directs our attention to the behavior of the hi&hes~ 5 plants alone. He shows that some (and be might add that all) of them execute movements for their own advantage, and that some capture and digest living prey. When plants are seen to move and to devour what faculties are left that are distinctively animal? ' .As to insectivorous or otherwise carnivorous plants, we have so recently here discussed this subject-before it attained to all this new popularity-that a brief account of Mr. Darwin's investigation may suffice/ It 1 The Nation, Nos. 457, 458, 1874. It was in these somewhat light and desultory, but substantiall,JO serious, articles that some account of Mr. Darwin's observations upon the digestive powers of IJrose1·a and JJionaJa first appeared; in fact, their leading motive was to make sufficient reference to his then unpublished discoveries to guard against expected or possible claims to priority. Dr. Burdon-Sanderson's lecture, and the report in Nature, which :first made them known in Eugland, appeared later. A mistake on our part in the reading of a somewhat ambiguous sentence in a letter led to the remark, at the close of the first of those articles (p. 295), that the leaf-trap of JJionaJa had been paralyzed on one side in consequence of a dexterous puncture. What was communicated really related to IJro.~era. 14 |