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Casualties and diseases of vegetable life
Casualties and diseases of vegetable life Author:Bruce Findlay Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CASUALTIES AND DISEASES VEGETABLE LIFE. Before examining the casualties of vegetable life it is important that we should know what a vegetable or plant rea... more »lly is, for it is a term the most ignorant presume they understand, although the most learned are unable exactly to define; for a plant is, as Theophrastus long ago observed, "A various thing, of which it is difficult to give a definition." Physiologists the most astute have laboured, and do labour still, comprehensively to define a plant. The dilemma somewhat resembles that in which an ancient philosopher is said to have been involved, who, when desiring to state what motion was, after much consideration, rose from his seat, walked towards the inquirer, and replied, " You see it. I can show it to you, but I cannot tell you what motion is." Thus, also, a botanist might answer, " Here are plants; you see them, even if I cannot tell you precisely what a vegetable is." Let not the bearing of this statement, however, be misunderstood. It is not Science who makes the difficulty she here points out. She only shows what already is, just as a microscope does not make the hairs on a mite's back, but only brings them within our sphere of vision. If vegetables are living beings, endowed with sensation and instinct, or anything approaching to it, so as to give them a resemblance to animals, how are we certainly to distinguish chapter{Section 4the plant from the animal? At the extreme of the two kingdoms the distinction is easy. The more perfect animals can never be mistaken for plants, nor the more perfect plants for animals ; but at the mean the shades of discrimination are so very faint that of some individual productions it is almost impossible to say to which of the kingdoms they belong. Hence it is that substances which have a...« less