the foot-stalks between the stems and the leaflets, which seems to be their most sensitive or irritable part.  Now as their situation after being exposed to external violence resembles their sleep, but with a greater degree of collapse, may it not be owing to a numbness or paralysis consequent to too violent irritation, like the faintings of animals from pain or fatigue?  I kept a sensitive plant in a dark room till some hours after day-break:  its leaves and leaf-stalks were collapsed as in its most profound sleep, and on exposing it to the light, above twenty minutes passed before the plant was thoroughly awake and had quite expanded itself.  During the night the upper or smoother surfaces of the leaves are appressed together; this would seem to shew that the office of this surface of the leaf was to expose the fluids of the plant to the light as well as to the air.  See note on Helianthus.  Many flowers close up their petals during the night.  See note on vegetable respiration in Part I.]

        Veil’d, with gay decency and modest pride,
310 Slow to the mosque she moves, an eastern bride;
        There her soft vows unceasing love record,
        Queen of the bright seraglio of her Lord.—­
        So sinks or rises with the changeful hour
        The liquid silver in its glassy tower.
315 So turns the needle to the pole it loves,
        With fine librations quivering as it moves.

        All wan and shivering in the leafless glade
        The sad ANEMONE reclined her head;
        Grief on her cheeks had paled the roseate hue,
320 And her sweet eye-lids dropp’d with pearly dew. 
        —­“See, from bright regions, borne on odorous gales
        The Swallow, herald of the summer, sails;

[Anemone. l. 318.  Many males, many females.  Pliny says this flower never opens its petals but when the wind blows; whence its name:  it has properly no calix, but two or three sets of petals, three in each set, which are folded over the stamens and pistil in a singular and beautiful manner, and differs also from ranunculus in not having a melliferous pore on the claw of each petal. ]

[The Swallow. l. 322.  There is a wonderful conformity between the vegetation of some plants, and the arrival of certain birds of passage.  Linneus observes that the wood anemone blows in Sweden on the arrival of the swallow; and the marsh mary-gold, Caltha, when the cuckoo sings.  Near the same coincidence was observed in England by Stillingfleet.  The word Coccux in Greek signifies both a young fig and a cuckoo, which is supposed to have arisen from the coincidence of their appearance in Greece.  Perhaps a similar coincidence of appearance in some parts of Asia gave occasion to the story of the loves of the rose and nightingale, so much celebrated by the eastern poets.  See Dianthus.  The times however of the appearance of vegetables in the spring seem occasionally to be influenced by their acquired