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Show I I ~ ~--· ' .. 328 ANl11fALS BETTER KNOWN and of many of these they have no notion, except in the state in which they appear at market or afterward. There are, in London, for instance, many intelligent, and by no means illiterate persons, well versed enough in all the science necessary f~r the conducting of business, and in the common literature and occurrences of the day ; but who, if you were to walk through Covent Garden with them, and request them to make so simple a distinction as to point out all the vegetables there that w.ere produced in the air, and all that were produced Ill the eart~1, would find themselves sadly puzzled. So also, If you asked them to point out ~vhich are the l?roductions of annual plants, and which of larger kmd; or which were natives of Britain and which not, they would be at a loss. In like manner, if the production were a seed, a fruit, or a root, they would not be able to tell you any thing about the leaf or the flower ; and if you questioned them as to the mode of culture, you would find them still sooner at a loss. If they happened to have flower- pots or gardens, and were fond of these, they would, no doubt, be able to say something about what were grown in them, and mention the names and describe the appearances of the favourite and fashionable sorts. But take them to a common, or a natural copse, or a tangled hedge, or the sedgy bank of a river, and question them of the productions there, and the probability is that, in nine cases out of every ten, you would either get no answer at all or a wrong one. If the question were respecting animals, the answers would, in the more familiar species, be more ready and more accurate. The motions of those animals that do possess the power of mov1ng from place to place render the observation of them a much more palpable matter than the observation of plants; and as they move entire, and carry all their functions with them, while plants do not of themselves change their places, and, tm]ess in any pc->cu- 'P THAN PLANTS. 329 liar species, and those not of every-day observation by the public, their functions are suspended when they are taken out of the earth or the water, they are much less frequently seen in their active states. Even in these states, the progress of vegetable action is so slow that we must have an interval of time before we can notice it. Some of the gourds and turnips produce a great quantity of vegetable matter in little time; the growth of many of the fungi is still more rapid; and in the course of a day or two, the buds of a large mulberry-tree will expand into millions of leaves ; but still we do not actually see the motion, even in the most rapid of them ; and though we watched the mulberry-tree from the very first action of the buds to the full expansion of the leaves, we should not be able to find out that it had altered at all, if we did not remember a former state, and compare that with the present. That the plant acts at all is, therefore, a matter of inference, and not one of immediate sensation. But the action of the animal is at once palpahle to sense, and forms so immediate a part of our whole perception of it, that it is by inference we conclude that it has been or can be in a state different from that in which we see it. It is chiefly, if not entirely, from matter in motion that we get our notion of what we call power; and when we can trace that motion up to any substance, but not farther, we ascribe the power to that substance. Thus, when we see a horse start off upon the ground, a bird in the air, or a fish in the water, it having been previously in a state of rest, we say there is a power of running in the horse, of flying in the bird, and of swimming in the fish; and though the original word animal probably expresses "to breathe," or "that which breathes," our common understanding of it is so much associated with the fact of moving without being forced on by any other piece of matter previously in motion, that we consider life itself |