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have feeling, he makes use of the word nervimotilité. Here I must observe, that when we come to examine it closely, what we think to ourselves in the conception of spontaneity, is in the end always the same thing as manifestation of will, with which spontaneity would therefore be simply synonymous. The only difference between them consists in the conception of spontaneity being derived from outer perception, while that of manifestation of will is drawn from our own consciousness. I find a remarkable instance of the impetuous violence of this spontaneity, even in plants, in the following communication contained in the Cheltenham Examiner: 1 "Last Thursday four enormous mushrooms performed a heroic feat of a new kind, in one of our most crowded streets, by lifting up a huge block of stone in their strenuous effort to make their way into the visible world."
In the Mémoire de l'Académie des Sciences de l'année 1821, Cuvier says 2 : "For centuries botanists have been searching for the reason why in a seed which is germinating the root invariably grows downwards, while the stalk as invariably grows upwards, no matter what be the position in which the seed is placed. M. Dutrochet put some seeds into holes bored in the bottom of a vessel filled with damp mould, which he hung up to a beam in his room. Now, in this case, the stem might have been expected to grow downwards. Not at all: the roots found their way to the air below, and the stems were prolonged so as to traverse the damp mould until they reached its upper surface. According to M. Dutrochet, the direction in which plants grow, is determined by an inner principle and not at all by the attraction of the bodies towards which they direct themselves. A mistletoe seed that was fastened to the point of a perfectly moveable needle fixed
1 Repeated in the Times of June 2nd, 1841.
2 Vol. v. p. 171. Paris, 1826.
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