use.

On this, La Metherie remarks, that he first described these red vessels in the sap of the willow, l'yeble, and the hortensia, in the great work which he published on vegetation. In raising the medullary substance of a branch of the willow, La Metherie says (Considerations sur les corps organizès t. 3, p. 454) I remarked a great number of red vessels which generally formed concentric zones. They are placed in the medullary substance a quarter of a line or more from the wood; in l'yeble they are very thick. Examined with a glass, they are semitransparent and composed of small knots like the lymphatic vessels in animals. They are perfectly distinct from the tracheæ or air vessels.

I presume they are meant to supply the circulation of the fluids in the medullary substance, like the vessels in fruits. I showed (says La Metherie) these vessels to several scavans, and to M. Palissot himself.

Duhamel (in his Physique des Arbres, t. 1, p. 38) has spoken of longitudinal fibres which he observed in the pith of the willow; they assume, he says, a red colour in the old branches: but these fibres are not the red vessels of La Metherie, which are found in

Bulletin de la Societè Philomathique for July 1816, and acknowledges he has been mistaken, and is now convinced of

the impossibility of such a change ever taking place.

siderations sur les etres organizès I have described (says La Metherie) with much care the different parts which form a vegetable, and I have shown that they are analagous to the different tissues or systems which Pinel, Bichat, and other physiologists have remarked in animals. I have compared the physiology of vegetables with that of animals, and all those who have observed the phenomena of living beings, have remarked the strong analogies between the organic functions of these two classes.

Such were Pythagoras, his disciple Empedocles, Hippocrates, Aristotle, Theophrastus, among the ancient philosophers of Greece. Such were among the moderns Camerarius, Leuwenhoeck, Malpighi, Grew, Gesner, Perrault, Tournefort, Linnæus, Jussieu,—all these have observed the analogy between animals and vegetables and made it a ground of their re searches.

As the functions of animals are better known than those of vegetables, the physiology of the latter has constantly been referred to that of the former. In my Considerations sur les etres organizès, I have pursued the same course, and taken a general view of these beings, divided into fifteen classes.

1st and 2d classes, animals with bones and red blood.

3d, 4th, 5th, 6th and 7th classes, animals without bones and with white blood.

8th and 9th classes, animals without bones or sexual distinctions; agenist (from alpha privitiva, and yoμas gigno.)

10th and 11th classes, agenist vegetables, without known sexual marks. Cryptogamous.

12th, 13th, 14th and 15th classes, vegetables with manifest sexual organs, acotyledons, monocotyledons, dicotyledons, polycotyledons. And I have shown, continues La Metherie,

1st. That between the lowest classes of animals which are void of sexual distinction, (agenist or cryptogamous) such as the polypi, the wheel animals, &c. and the agenist or cryptogamous family of vegetables, also without marks of sexual distinction, those that form the commencement of vegetable organic being, the tremellas, the confervas, &c. there is so strong an analogy, that the line of distinction can hardly be drawn.

2dly. The organization of vegetables has also the strongest analogy with that of animals; both are formed out of, composed of cellular tissue, serous membranes, mucous membranes, and fibrous membranes of organs of respiration, nutrition, circulation, and secretion.

3dly. Vegetables, like animals, have vital powers. They have irritability, excitability, and some of them, such as the valisneria, the mimosa, &c. have motions perfectly characterized. Others like the arums, have much sensible heat at the period of their flowering. These vital powers in animals and in vegetables, appear to be the effects of galvanic action which their different parts exert on each other.

4thly. Vegetables feed and are nourished like animals. We find in the one and in the other a great variety of fluids secreted by the vital action of the system.

5thly. These fluids circulate in vegetables, as they do in animals. (?) This circulation differs in animals who possess a heart, arteries, and veins, from what it is

in animals (as the agenist tribe) who have no heart. Vegetable circulation is most similar to that which takes place in the last mentioned and lowest species of animals.

6thly. Vegetables respire; but their respiration seems most like that of the agenist animals.

7thly. Vegetables have secretions analogous to those of animals, carried on by means of similar organs, as glandular tissues.

8thly. Vegetables produce offspring like animals; for the most part by means of sexual organs and prolific fluid.

But among some vegetables, as among some animals, there is spontaneous generation.

9thly. The vegetable lives, sleeps, and dies, like the animal. (He might have said, the vegetable lives, breathes, feeds, digests, secretes, excretes, sleeps, grows old, and dies, either accidentally of disease, or naturally by rigidity of fibre, and gradually diminished excitability, like the animal.)

This analogy of vegetable and animal organic functions, shows that scientifically, they may be classed as forming one family; and vegetable physiology cannot make its due progress unless by keeping in view these relations.*

I have already referred to M. Mirbel's General view of vegetable nature: the following table of Humbolt is an interesting summary of the modern progress in botany. According to him, the species of plants described by the Greeks, Romans, and Arabians, scarcely

* There is no doubt, I apprehend, of the existence of these analogies; still, nothing like voluntarity is distinctly made out among vegetable motions: so that for the present this seems to form a line of distinction. T. C.

I suspect the work of De LabilI suspect the work of De Labillardiere and the voyage to Australasia of Peron, will add greatly to the last of these articles.

The third Number of Mr. Brande's journal contains an account of a new species of agave of the alstenia teiformis, a substitute for tea, and a new moss, named tyaloria splachnoides. Also a neat tabular view of the liliacèes by J. P. Redoute: being an arrange ment of the monocotyledons contained in the eight costly volumes of Redouté.

ZOOLOGY.

La Marck has published a new edition of his Systeme des Animaux sans Vertebres, in three volumes, of which the first two only have arrived in America. There is something like neglect of foreign and particularly of French science in England; so that La Marck's system, though prevalent in France and Germany, has made no way in Great Britain yet. Parkinson, in his third volume of organic remains, has translated the generic descriptions, but we have no En

glish translation of La Marck's whole work. In geology generally, the English keep up at least an equality with the French philosophers, but in the particular department of the investigation and classification of fossil remains, and their reference to appropriate strata, they are certainly behind hand. The defence of the Mosaic account of the Creation, by the Rev. Mr. Townsend of Pewsey, has merit in this respect.

The voyage of discovery to Australasia, of which the account was drawn up chiefly by Peron, has added so many new facts to zoology, respecting land animals, reptiles, insects, fishes, and particularly in the tribe of moluscæ, to which M. Le Sueur on that voyage paid indefatigable attention, that we must wait for an opportunity of deliberately examining the second volume recently published and satisfactory account can be given now daily expected here, before a of this very interesting voyage. But one part of zoology the most interesting, that of our own speand Le Sueur with a more accucies, has been enriched by Peron rate account of the Boschesmen than has appeared before. Something of them we knew from Vaillant and Barrow, but we now know more from the descriptions of M. M. Peron and Le Sueur, and the accurate drawings of this last gentleman, who was designer to the expedition. What the unpublished travels in Africa of W. J. Burchell, Esq. will produce, cannot yet be known.

In the peculiarities of this species of the human race, the Boschesman has been confounded with the Hottentot; but the singularities of conformation ascribed to the latter, belong exclusively to the former.

join, being somewhat rounded and not terminating in an angle like the European; they have hair curled, but so short as to appear at first view as if they were shaved; they are active, but not equal to the white man in strength, though

1. The Boschesmen, or people of the back woods, are only found in the country, north, north west, and north east of the Cape of Good Hope, in the great Karoo, the mountains of Shewberg, and the country of Candebo. They border on the Caffres or Hottentots, with whom they are generally at war. They occupy a large tract of

country.

2. They have no cities or houses; or any well characterized marks of civilization. They live chiefly in caves, and holes in the rocks; but they herd together in kraals or villages, and hunt in packs; their arms are bows and arrows, and sticks; they have no language intelligible to, or acquirable by the European; they have no marks of religion or worship; they learn with difficulty when brought to the Cape, a few Dutch words; they have no sense of modesty, either as to their persons, or the gratification of their desires.

3. They are the most homely of the human species: their eyes are small, piercing, always in motion; their stature seldom exceeding fifty-two inches English; they have the leaden colour of the Malay, and are not so black as the Hottentots; their face appears to be all forehead, and has many characters of the monkey; they have properly no nose, their nostrils are broad but very slightly prominent above the face; their lips are very thick and projecting; their eyebrows are somewhat like the Chinese, and

fatigue.

4. Their women have not, as commonly supposed, a "tablier" or flap that covers the pudenda, but a funicular appendage attached by a strait peduncle, to the upper part of the labia pudendi, which increases in thickness as it descends, and in adults is about four inches and a half or five inches in length, covering the lower part of the labia: it is of a reddish colour, in substance like the skin of the dartos, it is somewhat like a large dependent penis, soft, extensible, wrinkled, devoid of hair, slit or bifid from about the mid length to its extremity, so that the two halves can be thrown over the labia pudendi on each side, when the female lies down. This organ is not a clitoris, it is not a disease, for it is universal among them, nor is it the effect of mechanical handling or extension; young girls have it of size proportioned to their age. It covers the urinary passage, clitoris, and part of the entrance of the vagina. The females have their thighs rather thin, but their but tocks very prominent, large, and fat, and an adipose protuberance projects from behind on each buttock, so large and prominent that the feet of their infants rest upon it. These characters are lessened by commixture with men of other species, as with the Hottentots. Their breasts in the adult, swell out from the sternum, are then drawn in toward the middle, and swell out again, so as to be of the form of a calibash or gourd. On