Page:History of botany (Sachs; Garnsey).djvu/574

and movements of irritability were connected without difficulty with the forms of movement that had been long known in the vegetable kingdom, and contributed to correct the views that had been entertained respecting them. But this was not the case for a time with two phenomena which also fall within the province of phytodynamics, namely normal growth and the movements of the protoplasm, which exhibit the two opposite extremes, so to speak, of the facts connected with movement. Various measurements had been made of the growth of plants since the beginning of the century, and attempts had been made to establish its dependence on light and heat, but without any great success. Treviranus had rediscovered the movements of the protoplasm in 1811 in Nitella. Similar movements were repeatedly pointed out by Amici, Meyen, and Schleiden in the cells of higher plants, but they were taken for streamings of the cell-sap; it was still unknown that all these were movements of the same organised substance, which moves independently in water in the form of swarmspores. These phenomena, especially the movements of swarmspores, were noticed and studied separately between 1830 and 1840, but no one thought of bringing both these movements and the mechanical laws of normal growth into connection with the phenomena which had usually been treated together under the head of movements in the vegetable kingdom. De Candolle and Meyen did not mention them in this connection in their 'Compendia' of 1835 and 1839; Meyen on the contrary discussed the 'circulation of the cell-juice' with nutrition, and the movement of swarmspores with the propagation of Algae. The two writers just named, like Du Hamel before them, divided into two main groups the movements in the vegetable kingdom which had been long known and were usually put together, and treated of geotropic and heliotropic curvatures and the movements of tendrils and climbing plants under the head of direction of plants, and the periodical movements and movements connected with irritability under that of move-