Chambers's Journal of Popular Literature, Science, and Art, Fifth Series, No. 112, Vol. III, February 20, 1886

No. 112.—Vol. III.
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SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 20, 1886.
The old maxim regarding the power of habit is usually and rightly regarded as exhibiting a thorough application to the regulation of animal life. Not merely in human affairs is habit allowed to be ‘a second nature;’ but in lower life as well, the influence of use and wont is plainly perceptible. A dog or cat equally with a human being is under the sway of the accustomed. That which may be at first unusual, soon becomes the normal way of life. Even, as the physiologist can prove, in a very large part of ordinary human existence, we are the creatures of habit quite as much as we are the children of impulse. It is easily provable, for example, that such common acts as are involved in reading, writing, and speaking, are merely perpetuated habits. At first, these acquirements present difficulties to the youthful mind. A slow educative process is demanded, and then, by repetition and training, the lower centres of the brain acquire the power of doing the work of higher parts and centres. We fall into the habit, in other words, of writing and speaking, just as our muscles fall into the way of guiding our movements. No doubt, a large part of the difficulty is smoothed away for us by the fact that we inherit the aptitude for the performance of these common actions. But they fall, nevertheless, into the category of repeated and inherited habits; and equally with the newer or fresh ideas and tasks we set ourselves, the actions of common life may be regarded as merely illustrating the curious and useful effect of repeated and fixed habit on our organisation.
Recent researches in the field of plant-life, however, it is interesting to note, show that habit does not reign paramount in the animal world alone. The plant-world, it has been well remarked, too often presents to the ordinary observer the aspect of a sphere of dull pulseless life, wherein activity is unrepresented, and wherein the familiar actions of animal existence are unknown. Nothing is farther from the truth than such an idea. The merest tyro in botany is nowadays led to study actions in plants which are often indistinguishable from those of animal life. Instead of the plant-world being a huge living domain which never evinces a sign of sensation or activity, the botanist can point to numerous cases in which not only are the signs of sensibility as fully developed in the plant as in the animal, but in which also many other phases of animal life are exactly imitated. We thus know of plants which droop their leaves on the slightest touch, and exhibit as delicate a sensitiveness as many high animals, and a much finer degree of sensibility than most low animals. Then, again, when, with the microscope, we inspect that inner plant-life which is altogether hidden from the outer world, we see that the tissues of plants exist in a state of high activity. Currents of protoplasm are seen to run hither and thither through the plant-cells, and active movements to pervade the whole organisation of the living organism. Vital activity is the rule, and inertness the exception, in plant-life; and the discovery of this fact simply serves to impress anew upon us the danger and error of that form of argument which would assume the non-existence of higher traits of life in plants, simply because they are invisible to the unassisted sight.