The researches thus initiated led to the proof that plants are capable of secreting a digestive fluid like that of animals, and of profiting by the result of digestion; whereby the peculiar apparatuses of the insectivorous plants were brought within the scope of natural selection. Moreover, these inquiries widely enlarged our knowledge of the manner in which stimuli are transmitted in plants, and opened up a prospect of drawing closer the analogies between the motor processes of plants and those of animals. So with respect to the books on "Climbing Plants" (1875), and on the "Power of Movement in Plants" (1880), Darwin says;-- "I was led to take up this subject by reading a short paper by Asa Gray, published in 1858. He sent me some seeds, and on raising some plants I was so much fascinated and perplexed by the revolving movements of the tendrils and stems, which movements are really very simple, though appearing at first sight very complex, that I procured various other kinds of climbing plants and studied the whole subject.... Some of the adaptations displayed by climbing plants are as beautiful as those of orchids for ensuring cross-fertilisation." (I, p. 93.) In the midst of all this amount of work, remarkable alike for its variety and its importance, among plants, the animal kingdom was by no means neglected. A large moiety of "The Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication" (1868), which contains the _pièces justificatives_ of the first chapter of the "Origin," is devoted to domestic animals, and the hypothesis of "pangenesis" propounded in the second volume applies to the whole living world. In the "Origin" Darwin throws out some suggestions as to the causes of variation, but he takes heredity, as it is manifested by individual organisms, for granted, as an ultimate fact; pangenesis is an attempt to account for the phenomena of heredity in the organism, on the assumption that the physiological units of which the organism is composed give off gemmules, which, in virtue of heredity, tend to reproduce the unit from which they are derived.