Abstract
IT is sometimes asserted that the power of movement is a character distinguishing animals from plants. This statement arises to some extent from an obvious confusion of thought. Trees are stationary, they are rooted to one spot; but they are not, therefore, motionless. We think them so because our eyes are dull—a fault curable with the help of a microscope. And when we get into the land of magnification, where the little looks big and the slow looks quick, we see such evidence of movement that we wonder we do not hear as well as see the stream of life that flows before our eyes.
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References
Cohn 's Beiträge, 1894.
Pfeffer, in the Annals of Botany, September 1894. Further details in Czapek's paper in Pringsheim's Jahrb., 1895.
F. Darwin, Annals of Botany, December, 1899.
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See James Ward, "Naturalism and Agnosticism," i. 283.
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Loc. cit. p. 288.
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The Movements of Plants 1 . Nature 65, 40–44 (1901). https://doi.org/10.1038/065040a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/065040a0