of vegetables are to be enumerated amongst
the inferior orders of animals. Of these the anthers and stigmas have
already been shewn to possess some organs of sense, to be nourished by
honey, and to have the power of generation like insects, and have thence
been announced amongst the animal kingdom in Sect. XIII. and to these must
be added the buds and bulbs which constitute the viviparous offspring of
vegetation. The former I suppose to be beholden to a single living filament
for their seminal or amatorial procreation; and the latter to the same
cause for their lateral or branching generation, which they possess in
common with the polypus, taenia, and volvox; and the simplicity of which is
an argument in favour of the similarity of its cause.

Linnaeus supposes, in the Introduction to his Natural Orders, that very few
vegetables were at first created, and that their numbers were increased by
their intermarriages, and adds, suadent haec Creatoris leges a simplicibus
ad composita. Many other changes seem to have arisen in them by their
perpetual contest for light and air above ground, and for food or moisture
beneath the soil. As noted in Botanic Garden, Part II. Note on Cuscuta.
Other changes of vegetables from climate, or other causes, are remarked in
the Note on Curcuma in the same work. From these one might be led to
imagine, that each plant at first consisted of a single bulb or flower to
each root, as the gentianella and daisy; and that in the contest for air
and light new buds grew on the old decaying flower stem, shooting down
their elongated roots to the ground, and that in process of ages tall trees
were thus formed, and an individual bulb became a swarm of vegetables.
Other plants, which in this contest for light and air were too slender to
rise by their own strength, learned by degrees to adhere to their
neighbours, either by putting forth roots like the ivy, or by tendrils like
the vine, or by spiral contortions like the honeysuckle; or by growing upon
them like the misleto, and taking nourishment from their barks; or by only
lodging or adhering on them, and deriving nourishment from the air, as
tillandsia.

Shall we then say that the vegetable living filament was originally
different from that of each tribe of animals above described? And that the
productive living filament of each of those tribes was different originally
from the other? Or, as the earth and ocean were probably peopled with
vegetable product