PLANT LIFE.

Lake Wakatip Mail, Issue 1582, 25 March 1887, Page 3

PLANT LIFE.

It is now beginning to be recognised that plants and animals have a life in common, notwithstanding the diversity in its outward manifestation; and that ea?h in its own sphere and for its owu purposes, requires similar kinds of apparatus for carrying on its life work. Protection and support, nutrition and reproduction, sensibility and movements of various kinds, are eenubilities for both; a skin and skr-leton, a feeding and reproductive apparatus, parts specially endowed with sensibility and mobility, perform eimilar functions in each. The animal may, and does, require additional appliances to those of the plant, but that dons not interfere with the general similarity of their life processes. This comparative study of plant and animal has only been rendered possible by viewing them together from a physiological standpoint. So long as rorm and structure constituted the bulk of biological study, there was little common ground to be made out between plant and aninnl other than their common origin. Skin and bone, muscle and nerve, heart and lungs, have no strict parallel, as such, in the vegetable kingdom. But when plants are viewed, not as mere machines, but as living, growing, and developing organisms, inheriting tendencies, influencing and influenced by the various natural forces and living beings surrounding them, then it is seen that the two great divisions of life are but parts of one whole. The earliest plants and animals lived in common without any distinguishing marks of their future destiny; but soon the characteristic properties of each appeared, and then the special mode of feeding differentiated them. The plant, having acquired its green coluring-matter, or chlorophyll, was enabled to live independently upon the inorganic matter around it. Some plants, however, did not advance to the perfect stage of an indepandent existence, and did not acquire the green colouring-matter, but preyed upon other plants and animals, living or dead, or their products • or it may be that having acquired the green colour they afterwards found they could get on without it, and so dropped it altogether. Hence arose the plants with chlorophyll—Alt®, and the plants without chlorophyll—Fungi j the essential difference being that one used tie special vegetable mode of feeding, while the other adopted the animal mode. Each having the same initial

impulse, advanced along somewhat parallel lines, the independent Algao developing higher and higher forms, while the parasitic and saprophytic Fungi led a comparatively degraded existence, and latterly stopped short in their course of development.—Life Histories of Plants, 1 by Professor M'Alpine.