Oporinus, a printer, who, being mployed one night in correcting the copy of a Greek book, fell asleep as he read, and yet ceased not to read, till he had finished not less than a whole page, of which, when he awoke, he retained no recollection.

There are many curious histories of sleeping prodigies on record. The Philosophical Transactions have several in one, a man slept from August till January. There is a case, read before a society of physicians in 1756, of Elizabeth Orvin, who began her sleeping fit in 1738, by a four days' nap, and for ten years afterwards never slept less than seventeen hours out of the four-andtwenty. Dr. Brady relates, that some strange methods were resorted to to rouse her-such as rubbing her back with honey, and in a hot day exposing her to a hive of bees, till her back was full of bumps;-making a pincushion of her, and performing acu-puncturation with pins and needles;-flagellation, and "other odd experiments," which the doctor informs us he thinks better" to pass over in silence," all of which might as well have been spared, for she was very sulky, and good-for-nothing, when she was awake. This sulkiness, however, should be noticed, as being connected with the complaint. Previously to this somnolent disease, many of the persons have become uneasy, sullen, and surly. In all, the mind has evidently been affected; and in some, where there has been extreme abstinence, their waking hours have been characterised by decided mental aberration.

A lady in perfect health, twenty-three years of age, was asked by the parents of a friend to be present at a severe surgical operation. On consideration, it was thought wrong to expose her to such a scene, and the operation was postponed for a few hours. She went to bed, however, with the imagination highly excited, and awoke in alarm, hearing, or thinking she heard, the shrieks of her friend under the agony of an operation. Convulsions and hysterics supervened, and, on their subsiding, she went into a profound sleep, which continued sixty-three hours. The most eminent of the faculty were then consulted, and she was cupped, which awoke her; but the convulsions returned, and she again went to sleep, and slept with few intermissions for a fortnight. For the next twelve months she remained perfectly well. The sleeping began again without any apparent cause, which, in irregular periods, continued for ten or twelve years, the length of the sleeping fits being from thirty to forty hours, diminished in duration as time went on, till she got well. Then arrived irritability, and total want of sleep for three months, which was succeeded by aberration of mind. This state continued about six months, when, to the relief of her friends, her sleeping fits returned, and were

very regular in their periods, both as to arrival and duration.

Her usual time for sleeping was fortyeight hours. She would in the intermediate day be very well, till twelve at night, when she went to bed. Sometimes she would awake for a few minutes, take some warm fluid, which was always kept ready with a lamp; but found any effort to remain awake unavailing, and the bare notion of attempting it gave her great horror.

Amongst the sleepy people of modern times, the case of Elizabeth Perkins, of Morley St, Peter, in Norfolk, should be noticed as a case somewhat resembling that just alluded to. For a considerable time she

was very regular in her times of waking, which was once in seven days, after which they became irregular and precarious, and, though of shorter duration, they were equally profound; and every attempt at keeping her awake, or awaking her, were vain. Various experiments were tried; and an itinerant empiric, elated with the hope of rousing her from what he called "her counterfeit sleep," blew into her nostrils the powder of white hellebore, being a very powerful sternutative; but the poor creature remained insensible to the inhumanity of the deed, which, instead of producing the boasted effect, excoriated the skin of her nose, lips, and face.

Buonaparte was polite enough to say to a gentleman, "J'irai dormir vite pour vous;" from which we may conclude, that he possessed some of the properties of the man who advertised, in the Spectator, that he intended to sleep at the Cock and Bottle, in Little Britain.

The following account of this affair is from a scarce tract in the British Museum :

"The sleepy man awakened of his five days' dream; being a most strange and won-" derful true account of one Nicholas Heart, a Dutchman, a patient of St. Bartholomew's Hospital, in West Smithfield, who sleeps five days every August: and you have a true relation how his mother fell in one of her sleeps on the first of August, she then being near the time of her labour; and on the fifth day she wakened, and was delivered. As soon as he was born, he sleeped for five days and five nights; together with the true dream which he and his mother dreamt every year alike. But what is more particular than all the rest, he gives an account of one Mr. William Morgan, who he saw hurried to a dismal, dark castle; and one Mr. John Paimer, he saw him going into a place of bliss: these two men were patients in the hospital, and dy'd while he was in his sleep. London: printed by Edward Midwinter, at the Sun, Pye Corner, Smithfield." We have here given the whole of the title, which tells nearly all about this sleepy set.

RECENT DISCOVERIES IN VEGE.

TABLE PHYSIOLOGY.*

(From the Foreign Review.-No. V.)

WHILE the spirit of philosophy has been taking possession of almost all the other natural sciences, it seems somewhat unaccountable that it should have been so long in transfusing itself into the accumulated mass of observations and experiments which constitute the science of vegetable physiology; By the labours of Grew, Lewenhoek, and many accurate observers who followed in their footsteps, the structure of the organs of plants has been ascertained with tolerable correctness; and a very considerable amount of information respecting the functions of those organs has been derived from the experiments and reasonings of Duhamel, Hales, Malpighi, and others. Still, however, the physiology of plants has never yet assumed the form and dignity of a science. The mens divinior was wanting, to separate its essential from its useless facts, to groupe them under general principles, and to exhibit those primary laws, which are absolutely necessary to the progress of science. The accumulation of facts and experiments had almost overwhelmed the few points of rational theory of which vegetable physiology could boast, and a number of doctrines half established, and speculations ingenious and plausible, usurped the place of fixed principles and rigorous views.

That plants derive their nourishment from the soil in which they grow, and that this nourishment, in the state of a fluid, is absorbed by the roots, and ascends through the stem and branches, are facts which must have forced themselves upon the notice of the most careless observer; but, through what channels the fluids thus absorbed rise in the plant, and by what forces they are sustained in the most elevated branches, contrary to their natural gravity, no physiologist could decide, till within these few years. As the vessels of the largest plants were of a capillary nature, the force of capillary attraction was almost universally regarded as the primary agent in producing the ascent of the sap; and as no other force could be found, an opinion so plausible seems never to have been subjected to a rigid examination. Although the force of capillary attraction increases with the smallness of the tube which exerts it, yet, however small a capillary tube may be, and however great may be the affinity which its substance has for the fluid it contains, the force which it exerts upon

the fluid never can raise it to he top of the tube, and cause it to flow from its upper orifice. Here, then, we have a criterion, by which we can ascertain whether or not the sap of plants ascends by capillary attraction. If the sap rise to the top of the capillary vessels, and flow over their summits, its ascent and its discharge must be produced by some other power than capillary attraction. That the sap thus ascends, and then over flows, is too notorious to require even to be stated;-nay, if we cut a portion out of the stem of some plants, the sap of the exscinded portion will flow out at both of its extremi ties, an effect which would be prevented in place of being promoted by capillary attrac tion. Hence it is demonstrable that, whatever may be the influence of the capillarity of the vessels of plants, there must be some other power than that of capillary attraction which produces the ascent of the sap.

M. Dutrochet commences his inquiry with the determination of the channels by which the sap is conveyed through plants. M. Decandolle had supposed that the sap ascends through what he calls the lymphatic vessels, the fausses trachea of Mirbel; and the truth of this conjecture has been put beyond a doubt by M. Dutrochet. These vessels are situated both in the laburnum and the heart wood, but they are never found in the bark nor in the medulla. These sap-vessels are simple tubes without valves, and have no lateral communication with each other,

That the force which causes the sap to ascend through these vessels resides in the roots, may be readily proved, according to our author, by the following fact:-If in spring we cut the stem of a vine close to the ground, the separated portion of the stem ceases to bleed, while the surface of the por tion attached to the roots continues to bleed

freely. If we make successive sections, proceeding downwards, till we reach the radicles, the same effect will be produced; and hence it follows, that the force which causes the sap to flow from the divided extremity of the plant must reside in the spongiole, or small conical body which forms the termination of each radicle.

Our limits will not permit us to enter into the details of these experiments, which first led our author to the discovery of the force now mentioned. Our principal object is to show how he established the leading doc trine.

Having taken the cæcum, or blind-gut of a young chicken, and cleaned it with pure water, he filled it half full with 196 grains of milk; and having tied up its open extremity, he placed it in water. At the end of 24 hours, the cæcum had imbibed 73 grains of water; and in 12 hours more the quantity of water imbibed was 117 grains, and the cæcum had become turgid. From this period the cæcum experienced a gradual

diminution of weight, and at the end of 36 hours it had lost 54 grains of the water which had formerly entered it, and the contained milky fluid had grown putrid. Here, then, we have exhibited to us two opposite actions of the organic membrane; 1st, that by which the water is imbibed; and 2nd, that by which it is expelled. In the first of these cases the milk, or internal fluid, was denser than the water, or external fluid; and while this state of the fluid continued, the cæcum continued to imbibe the water; but as soon as the milky fluid became putrid, and thinner than the external water, the latter passed out of the cæcum as rapidly as it formerly entered it.

To these two powers, by which an external fluid can be taken into an organic cavity, and again discharged from it, M. Dutrochet has given the names of Endosmose and Erosmose; the one derived from ardor, inward, and woμos, an impulse; and the other from , out, and wμoç, an impulse.

As the turgidity produced by the imbibition of the water, in the preceding experiment, stretches the sides of the cæcum, so as to cause them to react on the inclosed fluid, our Author was of opinion that this reaction would be capable of causing the fluid to rise in a tube fixed to the cæcum, when in a state of endosmose. He accordingly took a glass tube, 24 inches long, and about one-fifth of an inch in bore, and fixed one end in the cæcum of a chicken containing a solution of gum arabic. The glass tube being held in a vertical position, and the cæcum being immersed in rain water, the inclosed fluid rose in the tube, and at the end of 24 hours it began to discharge itself from the upper orifice. This overflow continued for two days, when it began to sink. Upon opening the cæcum on the fourth day, the inclosed fluid was found in a state of putridity. M. Dutrochet obtained similar results by substituting for the cæcum the inflated bladder ⚫ of the Colutea arborescens, or bladder senna. Having thus discovered a force capable of impelling the sap imbibed by the spongioles into the cells and capillary vessels of plants, our Author was desirous of ascertaining the cause of so singular an effect. An experiment by Porret, to which Professor Amici alludes, could not fail to suggest, that the phenomenon exhibited by animal or vegetable membranes was the result of electrical action. This chemist having divided a cylindrical jar into two compartments by a piece of bladder, he filled one of the com

The professor observed, by the aid of a microscope, a regular circulation in the sap of the chara vulgaris; he saw transparent globules of various sizes circulating in regular and uninterrupted motion, in two opposite alternating streams, in the two halves or sections of the single cylindrical canal, or vessel, which runs through the fibres of the plant. VOL. I. 3 D

partments, and left the other almost empty, with only a few drops of water in it. When the zinc pole of a galvanic pile was placed in the full compartment, and the copper pole in the empty one, the water passed from the full into the empty compartment, and rose in the latter much higher than it originally stood in the former. Following up the idea suggested by this remarkable experiment, M. Dutrochet tied the extremities of two tubes, one of which was capillary, to the pod of the Colutea arborescens. He now introduced the negative wire of the galvanic pile through a cork in the ordinary tube, into the pod, and then immersed the positive wire into a vessel of water in which the pod was placed. The pod quickly became turgid by the imbibition of the external water, and the water rising in the capillary tube, flowed over its upper extremity exactly in the same manner as it would have done in virtue of the force of endosmose, had the pod separated two fluids of different densities. The same result was obtained by substituting the cæcum of a chicken in place of the vegetable membrane. That endosmose is an electrical action, was rendered highly probable by the following experiment :-Our author introduced the white of an egg into the cæcum of a chicken, and when it was nearly full, he closed it and plunged it in water. The cæcum became speedily turgid; and after the action had continued some hours, a layer of coagulated albumen was found upon its inner surfaceone of the known effects of voltaic action.

From the experiments which we have now briefly described, we are entitled to conclude with M. Dutrochet, That it is by the action of endosmose that the sap is raised to the highest summits of trees, contrary to its natural gravity; and that this new force is the result of electrical action.

Such is the conclusion of the first section of M. Dutrochet's latest Memoir, which was read before the Royal Academy of Sciences on the 17th of March, 1828. The section which contains the application of these discoveries to physiology-to the phenomena of animal and vegetable life, has, we believe, not yet appeared, and we look forward to its publication with high interest. In his original work, "L'Agent Immédiat," he has entered very fully into this important subject; but beautiful as are many of his explanations of some of the most important functions and condition of the animal frame, and profound and ingenious as are all his views, yet they must soon be greatly modified and extended, by his subsequent discoveries of the activity and inactivity of different solids and fluids in the production of endosmose, and of the conversion of active into inactive fluids, by the introduction of a small portion of acid.

When we consider that the organs of animal bodies consist of a congeries of vesicles composed of permeable membrane, and

RECENT DISCOVERIES IN VEGE

TABLE PHYSIOLOGY.*

(From the Foreign Review.-No. V.)

WHILE the spirit of philosophy has been taking possession of almost all the other natural sciences, it seems somewhat unaccountable that it should have been so long in transfusing itself into the accumulated mass of observations and experiments which constitute the science of vegetable physiology; By the labours of Grew, Lewenhoek, and many accurate observers who followed in their footsteps, the structure of the organs of plants has been ascertained with tolerable correctness; and a very considerable amount of information respecting the functions of those organs has been derived from the experiments and reasonings of Duhamel, Hales, Malpighi, and others. Still, however, the physiology of plants has never yet assumed the form and dignity of a science. The mens divinior was wanting, to separate its essential from its useless facts, to groupe them under general principles, and to exhibit those primary laws, which are absolutely necessary to the progress of science. The accumulation of facts and experiments had almost overwhelmed the few points of rational theory of which vegetable physiology could boast, and a number of doctrines half established, and speculations ingenious and plausible, usurped the place of fixed principles and rigorous

the

struments, which (since iron rods and even less, 2), we multiply xtend their use

en raised with 1, the happiest fferent plants, wardness than superior qua s to an obser-that plants near thunderurs their dee to explain ofty forests, ids far from hey seek, as far greater while the s, boughs, nts, grant

of nature, that elec1 agent in noting the

property of double refraction, form an essential part of the siliceous grasses, and that all the separate crystals have their axes arranged, not in parallel lines, but so as to form geometrical figures by the light which they depolarise, points out a new relation between the laws which govern the crystallization of inanimate matter, and those which regulate the operations of vegetable life.

le that the he specific

The recent observations, too, of our distinguished countryman, Mr. Robert Brown, respecting what appear to be the active molecules of bodies, whether of mineral or vegetable origin, promise a rich harvest of discovery. He has announced the singular fact, that active spherical molecules exist in the grain and pollen of most plants along with its proper particles, and that these molecules have a spontaneous or inherent motion when immersed in water. Even when the pollen has been immersed in weak spirits for nearly a year, the apparent vitality of the particles still exists, nay, it remains in plants which have been dead for more than a century, and survives even the most intense heat to which animal and vegetable fibre can be exposed. These primary molecules exist in almost all minerals, and even in pounded glass. They occur, not only in their simple state, but also in a compound form. Oval particles, equal to about two molecules, and supposed to be primary combinations of these, often appeared, and were in general more vivid in their movements than the simple molecules, revolving most commonly on their longer axis, and frequently exhibiting a flattened form. Other compound molecules were seen resembling short fibres, and somewhat moniliform, and having their transverse diameter equal to that of the primary molecule. These fibrils, whether composed of two or three molecules, or of four or five, were generally in motion. This motion was, at least, as vivid as that of the simple molecules, and might be said to be somewhat vermicular. Whatever be the substance in which they occur, Mr. Brown considers the simple molecules to be of uniform size, and, from various measurements, he regards them as about the twenty thou sandth part of an inch in diameter.

these very same time, not entirely ts previously f Edinburgh, st of these exmyrtle trees, 1 of October, s, and blossomrubs that were Dé Nollet having ed with the same ame place, found e pots which had ee hours a day for prouts two or three in the unelectrified Larger shoots, and a n, in a given time. n as distinct an account ceat discovery of endosoyal Academy of Sciences a gold medal, we cannot Dutrochet without expresshope that we shall soon have y of announcing the successful of his labours, and that he will e subject to pass into other hands, brought within the dominion of al principles the leading phenomena table life.

- science of vegetable physiology is now ed at a point where great discoveries may soon expected. The extraordinary fact covered by Dr. Brewster, that innumerable ystals of silex, possessing distinctly the

The same curious subject is occupying the attention of the French botanists; and M. Adolphe Brongniart has published the results of some of his observations in his "Recherches sur le Génération et le Developpement de l'Embryon dans les Végétaux Ph nérogames," which was read before the A demy of Sciences, and has been publishe the "Annales des Sciences Naturelles.'

From the talents and activity of these botanists, we may expect with confid some highly important ! we tr we shall soon have calling the attentio ous a subject.

In consequence