After all, there never was just ground for denying to vegetables the use of animal food.  The fungi are by far the most numerous family of plants, and they all live upon organic matter, some upon dead and decomposing, some upon living, some upon both; and the number of those that feed upon living animals is large.  Whether these carnivorous propensities of higher plants which so excite our wonder be regarded as survivals of ancestral habits, or as comparatively late acquirements, or even as special endowments, in any case what we have now learned of them goes to strengthen the conclusion that the whole organic world is akin.

The volume upon “The Movements and Habits of Climbing Plants” is a revised and enlarged edition of a memoir communicated to the Linnaean Society in 1865, and published in the ninth volume of its Journal.  There was an extra impression, but, beyond the circle of naturalists, it can hardly have been much known at first-hand.  Even now, when it is made a part of the general Darwinian literature, it is unlikely to be as widely read as the companion volume which we have been reviewing; although it is really a more readable book, and well worthy of far more extended notice at our hands than it can now receive.  The reason is obvious.  It seems as natural that plants should climb as it does unnatural that any should take animal food.  Most people, knowing that some plants “twine with the sun,” and others “against the sun,” have an idea that the sun in some way causes the twining; indeed, the notion is still fixed in the popular mind that the same species twines in opposite directions north and south of the equator.

Readers of this fascinating treatise will learn, first of all, that the sun has no influence over such movements directly, and that its indirect influence is commonly adverse or disturbing, except the heat, which quickens vegetable as it does animal life.  Also, that climbing is accomplished by powers and actions as unlike those generally predicated of the vegetable kingdom as any which have been brought to view in the preceding volume.  Climbing plants “feel” as well as “grow and live;” and they also manifest an automatism which is perhaps more wonderful than a response by visible movement to an external irritation.  Nor do plants grow up their supports, as is unthinkingly supposed; for, although only growing or newly-grown parts act in climbing, the climbing and the growth are entirely distinct.  To this there is one exception—­an instructive one, as showing how one action passes into another, and how the same result may be brought about in different ways—­that of stems which climb by rootlets, such as of ivy and trumpet-creeper.  Here the stem ascends by growth alone, taking upward direction, and is fixed by root-lets as it grows.  There is no better way of climbing walls, precipices, and large tree-trunks.