"Minerals grow; vegetables grow and live; animals grow, live, and feel;" this is the well-worn, not to say out-worn, diagnosis of the three kingdoms by Linnaeus. It must be said of it that the agreement indicated in the first couplet is unreal, and that the distinction declared in the second is evanescent. Crystals do not grow at all in the sense that plants and animals grow. On the other hand, if a response to external impressions by special movements is evidence of feeling, vegetables share this endowment with animals; while, if conscious feeling is meant, this can be affirmed only of the higher animals. What appears to remain true is, that the difference is one of successive addition. That the increment in the organic world is of many steps; that in the long series no absolute lines separate, or have always separated, organisms which barely respond to impressions from those which more actively and variously respond, and even from those that consciously so respond--this, as we all know, is what the author of the works before us has undertaken to demonstrate. Without reference here either to that part of the series with which man is connected, and in some sense or other forms a part of, or to that lower limbo where the two organic kingdoms apparently merge--or whence, in evolutionary phrase, they have emerged--Mr. Darwin, in the present volumes, directs our attention to the behavior of the highest plants alone. He shows that some (and he might add that all) of them execute movements for their own advantage, and that some capture and digest living prey. When plants are seen to move and to devour, what faculties are left that are distinctively animal? As to insectivorous or otherwise carnivorous plants, we have so recently here discussed this subject--before it attained to all this new popularity--that a brief account of Mr. Darwin's investigation may suffice.[XI-2] It is full of interest as a physiological research, and is a model of its kind, as well for the simplicity and directness of the means employed as for the clearness with which the results are brought out--results which any one may verify now that the way to them is pointed out, and which, surprising as they are, lose half their wonder in the ease and sureness with which they seem to have been reached.