James M. Beck - "The Case of Edith Cavell"

Victor Hugo - "Napoleon the Little"

Thomas Babington Macaulay - "The History of England from the Accession of James II, Vol. 5"

Emma Lazarus - "The Poems of Emma Lazarus, Vol.I, Narrative, Lyric, and Dramatic"

Annual Bibliography of Commonwealth Literature 2007
This paper argues that discourses of love in Ghanaian market literature for youth offer a view into complex negotiations of agency and empowerment. Drawing on Deborah Durham's notion of youth as "social `shifters'" and Francis Nyamnjoh's conception of the "interconnectedness" of agency, I take Ghanaian market literature as one specific case of how African literature for youth foregrounds questions of continuity and change as African societies enter into increasingly complex global relations. In this literature for youth, received notions of love, often constructed out of impressions from American pop and hip hop music, carry new notions of agency that compete with existing "domesticated" forms. Authors like Ike Tandoh and Evelyn Tay employ discourses of love to offer youth alternative avenues for empowerment in a context of socio-economic disenfranchizement. In a creative process of "straddling", this writing both reveals and reproduces the contradictions that obtain in youth configurations of agency.

The Botanic Garden

E >> Erasmus Darwin >> The Botanic Garden




1. The vascular structure of the corol as above described, and which is
visible to the naked eye, and its exposing the vegetable juices to the
air and light during the day, evinces that it is a pulmonary organ.

2. As the glands which produce the prolific dust of the anthers, the
honey, wax, and frequently some odoriferous essential oil, are generally
attached to the corol, and always fall off and perish with it, it is
evident that the blood is elaborated or oxygenated in this pulmonary
system for the purpose of these important secretions.

3. Many flowers, as the Colchicum, and Hamamelis arise naked in autumn,
no green leaves appearing till the ensuing spring; and many others put
forth their flowers and complete their impregnation early in the spring
before the green foliage appears, as Mezereon, cherries, pears, which
shews that these corols are the lungs belonging to the fructification.

4. This organ does not seem to have been necessary for the defence of
the stamens and pistils, since the calyx of many flowers, as Tragopogon,
performs this office; and in many flowers these petals themselves are so
tender as to require being shut up in the calyx during the night, for
what other use then can such an apparatus of vessels be designed?

5. In the Helleborus-niger, Christmas-rose, after the seeds are grown to
a certain size, the nectaries and stamens drop off, and the beautiful
large white petals change their colour to a deep green, and gradually
thus become a calyx inclosing and defending the ripening seeds, hence it
would seem that the white vessels of the corol served the office of
exposing the blood to the action of the air, for the purposes of
separating or producing the honey, wax, and prolific dust, and when
these were no longer wanted, that these vessels coalesced like the
placental vessels of animals after their birth, and thus ceased to
perform that office and lost at the same time their white colour. Why
should they loose their white colour, unless they at the same time lost
some other property besides that of defending the seed-vessel, which
they still continue to defend?

6. From these observations I am led to doubt whether green leaves be
absolutely necessary to the progress of the fruit-bud after the last
year's leaves are fallen off. The green leaves serve as lungs to the
shoots and foster the new buds in their bosoms, whether these buds be
leaf-buds or fruit-buds; but in the early spring the fruit-buds expand
their corols, which are their lungs, and seem no longer to require green
leaves; hence the vine bears fruit at one joint without leaves, and puts
out a leaf-bud at another joint without fruit. And I suppose the green
leaves which rise out of the earth in the spring from the Colchicum are
for the purpose of producing the new bulb, and its placenta, and not for
the giving maturity to the seed. When currant or goosberry trees lose
their leaves by the depredation of insects the fruit continues to be
formed, though less sweet and less in size.

7. From these facts it appears that the flower-bud after the corol falls
off, (which is its lungs,) and the stamens and nectary along with it,
becomes simply an uterus for the purpose of supplying the growing
embryon with nourishment, together with a system of absorbent vessels
which bring the juices of the earth to the footstalk of the fruit, and
which there changes into an artery for the purpose of distributing the
sap for the secretion of the saccharine or farinaceous or acescent
materials for the use of the embryon. At the same time as all the
vessels of the different buds of trees inosculate or communicate with
each other, the fruit becomes sweeter and larger when the green leaves
continue on the tree, but the mature flowers themselves, (the succeeding
fruit not considered) perhaps suffer little injury from the green leaves
being taken off, as some florists have observed.

8. That the vessels of different vegetable buds inosculate in various
parts of their circulation is rendered probable by the increased growth
of one bud, when others in its vicinity are cut away; as it thus seems
to receive the nourishment which was before divided amongst many.




NOTE XXXVIII.--VEGETABLE IMPREGNATION.


_Love out their hour and leave their lives in air._

CANTO IV. l. 456.


From the accurate experiments and observations of Spallanzani it appears
that in the Spartium Junceum, rush-broom, the very minute seeds were
discerned in the pod at least twenty days before the flower is in full
bloom, that is twenty days before fecundation. At this time also the
powder of the anthers was visible, but glued fast to their summits. The
seeds however at this time, and for ten days after the blossom had
fallen off, appeared to consist of a gelatinous substance. On the
eleventh day after the falling of the blossom the seeds became heart-
shape, with the basis attached by an appendage to the pod, and a white
point at the apex; this white point was on pressure found to be a cavity
including a drop of liquor.

On the 25th day the cavity which at first appeared at the apex was much
enlarged and still full of liquor, it also contained a very small semi-
transparent body, of a yellowish colour, gelatinous, and fixed by its
two opposite ends to the sides of the cavity.

In a month the seed was much enlarged and its shape changed from a heart
to a kidney, the little body contained in the cavity was increased in
bulk and was less transparent, and gelatinous, but there yet appeared no
organization.

On the 40th day the cavity now grown larger was quite filled with the
body, which was covered with a thin membrane; after this membrane was
removed the body appeared of a bright green, and was easily divided by
the point of a needle into two portions, which manifestly formed the two
lobes, and within these attached to the lower part the exceedingly small
plantule was easily perceived.

The foregoing observations evince, 1. That the seeds exist in the
ovarium many days before fecundation. 2. That they remain for some time
solid, and then a cavity containing a liquid is formed in them. 3. That
after fecundation a body begins to appear within the cavity fixed by two
points to the sides, which in process of time proves to be two lobes
containing a plantule. 4. That the ripe seed consists of two lobes
adhering to a plantule, and surrounded by a thin membrane which is
itself covered with a husk or cuticle. Spalanzani's Dissertations, Vol.
II. p. 253.

The analogy between seeds and eggs has long been observed, and is
confirmed by the mode of their production. The egg is known to be formed
within the hen long before its impregnation; C.F. Wolf asserts that the
yolk of the egg is nourished by the vessels of the mother, and that it
has from those its arterial and venous branches, but that after
impregnation these vessels gradually become impervious and obliterated,
and that new ones are produced from the fetus and dispersed into the
yolk. Haller's Physiolog. Tom. VIII. p. 94. The young seed after
fecundation, I suppose, is nourished in a similar manner from the
gelatinous liquor, which is previously deposited for that purpose; the
uterus of the plant producing or secreting it into a reservoir or amnios
in which the embryon is lodged, and that the young embryon is furnished
with vessels to absorb a part of it, as in the very early embryon in the
animal uterus.

The spawn of frogs and of fish is delivered from the female before its
impregnation. M. Bonnet says that the male salamander darts his semen
into the water, where it forms a little whitish cloud which is
afterwards received by the swoln anus of the female, and she is
fecundated.--He adds that marine plants approach near to these animals,
as the male does not project a fine powder but a liquor which in like
manner forms a little cloud in the water.--And further adds, who knows
but the powder of the stamina of certain plants may not make some
impression on certain germs belonging to the animal kingdom! Letter
XLIII. to Spalanzani, Oevres Philos.

Spalanzani found that the seminal fluid of frogs and dogs even when
diluted with much water retained its prolific quality. Whether this
quality be simply a stimulus exciting the egg into animal action, which
may be called a vivifying principle, or whether part of it be actually
conjoined with the egg is not yet determined, though the latter seems
more probable from the frequent resemblance of the fetus to the male
parent. A conjunction however of both the male and female influence
seems necessary for the purpose of reproduction throughout all organized
nature, as well in hermaphrodite insects, microscopic animals, and
polypi, and exists as well in the formation of the buds of vegetables as
in the production of their seeds, which is ingeniously conceived and
explained by Linneus. After having compared the flower to the larva of a
butterfly, confining of petals instead of wings, calyxes instead of
wing-sheaths, with the organs of reproduction, and having shewn the use
of the farina in fecundating the egg or seed, he proceeds to explain the
production of the bud. The calyx of a flower, he says, is an expansion
of the outer bark, the petals proceed from the inner bark or rind, the
stamens from the alburnum or woody circle, and the style from the pith.
In the production and impregnation of the seed a commixture of the
secretions of the stamens and style are necessary; and for the
production of a bud he thinks the medulla or pith bursts its integuments
and mixes with the woody part or alburnum, and these forcing their
passage through the rind and bark constitute the bud or viviparous
progeny of the vegetable. System of Vegetables translated from Linneus,
p. 8.

It has been supposed that the embryon vegetable after fecundation, by
its living activity or stimulus exerted on the vessels of the parent
plant, may produce the fruit or seed-lobes, as the animal fetus produces
its placenta, and as vegetable buds may be supposed to produce their
umbilical vessels or roots down the bark of the tree. This in respect to
the production of the fruit surrounding the seeds of trees has been
assimilated to the gall-nuts on oak-leaves, and to the bedeguar on
briars, but there is a powerful objection to this doctrine, viz. that
the fruit of figs, all which are female in this country, grow nearly as
large without fecundation, and therefore the embryon has in them no
self-living principle.




NOTE XXXIX.--VEGETABLE GLANDULATION.


_Seeks, where fine pores their dulcet balm distil._

CANTO IV. l. 503.


The glands of vegetables which separate from their blood the mucilage,
starch, or sugar for the placentation or support of their seeds, bulbs,
and buds; or those which deposit their bitter, acrid, or narcotic juices
for their defence from depredations of insects or larger animals; or
those which secrete resins or wax for their protection from moisture or
frosts, consist of vessels too fine for the injection or absorption of
coloured fluids, and have not therefore yet been exhibited to the
inspection even of our glasses, and can therefore only be known by their
effects, but one of the most curious and important of all vegetable
secretions, that of honey, is apparent to our naked eyes, though before
the discoveries of Linneus the nectary or honey-gland had not even
acquired a name.

The odoriferous essential oils of several flowers seem to have been
designed for their defence against the depredations of insects, while
their beautiful colours were a necessary consequence of the size of the
particles of their blood, or of the tenuity of the exterior membrane of
the petal. The use of the prolific dust is now well ascertained, the wax
which covers the anthers prevents this dust from receiving moisture,
which would make it burst prematurely and thence prevent its application
to the stigma, as sometimes happens in moist years and is the cause of
deficient fecundation both of our fields and orchards.

The universality of the production of honey in the vegetable world, and
the very complicated apparatus which nature has constructed in many
flowers, as well as the acrid or deleterious juices she has furnished
those flowers with (as in the Aconite) to protect this honey from rain
and from the depredations of insects, seem to imply that this fluid is
of very great importance in the vegetable economy; and also that it was
necessary to expose it to the open air previous to its reabsorption into
the vegetable vessels.

In the animal system the lachrymal gland separates its fluid into the
open air for the purpose of moistening the eye, of this fluid the part
which does not exhale it absorbed by the puncta lachrymalia and carried
into the nostrils; but as this is not a nutritive fluid the analogy goes
no further than its secretion into the open air and its reabsorption
into the system; every other secreted fluid in the animal body is in
part absorbed again into the system, even those which are esteemed
excrementitious, as the urine and perspirable matter, of which the
latter is secreted, like the honey, into the external air. That the
honey is a nutritious fluid, perhaps the most so of any vegetable
production, appears from its great similarity to sugar, and from its
affording sustenance to such numbers of insects, which live upon it
solely during summer, and lay it up for their winter provision. These
proofs of its nutritive nature evince the necessity of its reabsorption
into the vegetable system for some useful purpose.

This purpose however has as yet escaped the researches of philosophical
botanists. M. Pontedera believes it designed to lubricate the vegetable
uterus, and compares the horn-like nectaries of some flowers to the
appendicle of the caecum intestinum of animals. (Antholog. p. 49.)
Others have supposed that the honey, when reabsorbed, might serve the
purpose of the liquor amnii, or white of the egg, as a nutriment for the
young embryon or fecundated seed in its early state of existence. But as
the nectary is found equally general in male flowers as in female ones;
and as the young embryon or seed grows before the petals and nectary are
expanded, and after they fall off; and, thirdly, as the nectary so soon
falls off after the fecundation of the pistillum; these seem to be
insurmountable objections to both the above-mentioned opinions.

In this state of uncertainty conjectures may be of use so far as they
lead to further experiment and investigation. In many tribes of insects,
as the silk-worm, and perhaps in all the moths and butterflies, the male
and female parents die as soon as the eggs are impregnated and excluded;
the eggs remaining to be perfected and hatched at some future time. The
same thing happens in regard to the male and female parts of flowers;
the anthers and filaments, which constitute the male parts of the
flower, and the stigma and style, which constitute the female part of
the flower, fall off and die as soon as the seeds are impregnated, and
along with these the petals and nectary. Now the moths and butterflies
above-mentioned, as soon as they acquire the passion and the apparatus
for the reproduction of their species, loose the power of feeding upon
leaves as they did before, and become nourished by what?--by honey alone.

Hence we acquire a strong analogy for the use of the nectary or
secretion of honey in the vegetable economy, which is, that the male
parts of flowers, and the female parts, as soon as they leave their
fetus-state, expanding their petals, (which constitute their lungs,)
become sensible to the passion, and gain the apparatus for the
reproduction of their species, and are fed and nourished with honey like
the insects above described; and that hence the nectary begins its
office of producing honey, and dies or ceases to produce honey at the
same time with the birth and death of the stamens and the pistils;
which, whether existing in the same or in different flowers, are
separate and distinct animated beings.

Previous to this time the anthers with their filaments, and the stigmas
with their styles, are in their fetus-state sustained by their placental
vessels, like the unexpanded leaf-bud; with the seeds existing in the
vegetable womb yet unimpregnated, and the dust yet unripe in the cells
of the anthers. After this period they expand their petals, which have
been shewn above to constitute the lungs of the flower; the placental
vessels, which before nourished the anthers and the stigmas, coalesce or
cease to nourish them; and they now acquire blood more oxygenated by the
air, obtain the passion and power of reproduction, are sensible to heat,
and cold, and moisture, and to mechanic stimulus, and become in reality
insects fed with honey, similar in every respect except their being
attached to the tree on which they were produced.

Some experiments I have made this summer by cutting out the nectaries of
several flowers of the aconites before the petals were open, or had
become much coloured, some of these flowers near the summit of the
plants produced no seeds, others lower down produced seeds; but they
were not sufficiently guarded from the farina of the flowers in their
vicinity; nor have I had opportunity to try if these seeds would
vegetate.

I am acquainted with a philosopher, who contemplating this subject
thinks it not impossible, that the first insects were the anthers or
stigmas of flowers; which had by some means loosed themselves from their
parent plant, like the male flowers of Vallisneria; and that many other
insects have gradually in long process of time been formed from these;
some acquiring wings, others fins, and others claws, from their
ceaseless efforts to procure their food, or to secure themselves from
injury. He contends, that none of these changes are more
incomprehensible than the transformation of tadpoles into frogs, and
caterpillars into butterflies.

There are parts of animal bodies, which do not require oxygenated blood
for the purpose of their secretions, as the liver; which for the
production of bile takes its blood from the mesenteric veins, after it
must have lost the whole or a great part of its oxygenation, which it
had acquired in its passage through the lungs. In like manner the
pericarpium, or womb of the flower, continues to secrete its proper
juices for the present nourishment of the newly animated embryon-seed;
and the saccharine, acescent, or starchy matter of the fruit or seed-
lobes for its future growth; in the same manner as these things went on
before fecundation; that is, without any circulation of juices in the
petals, or production of honey in the nectary; these having perished and
fallen off with the male and female apparatus for impregnation.

It is probable that the depredations of insects on this nutritious fluid
must be injurious to the products of vegetation, and would be much more
so, but that the plants have either acquired means to defend their honey
in part, or have learned to make more than is absolutely necessary for
their own economy. In the same manner the honey-dew on trees is very
injurious to them; in which disease the nutritive fluid, the vegetable-
sap-juice, seems to be exsuded by a retrograde motion of the cutaneous
lymphatics, as in the sweating sickness of the last century. To prevent
the depredation of insects on honey a wealthy man in Italy is said to
have poisoned his neighbour's bees perhaps by mixing arsnic with honey,
against which there is a most flowery declamation in Quintilian. No.
XIII. As the use of the wax is to preserve the dust of the anthers from
moisture, which would prematurely burst them, the bees which collect
this for the construction of the combs or cells, must on this account
also injure the vegetation of a country where they too much abound.

It is not easy to conjecture why it was necessary that this secretion of
honey should be exposed to the open air in the nectary or honey-cup, for
which purpose so great an apparatus for its defence from insects and
from showers became necessary. This difficulty increases when we
recollect that the sugar in the joints of grass, in the sugar-cane, and
in the roots of beets, and in ripe fruits is produced without the
exposure to the air. On supposition of its serving for nutriment to the
anthers and stigmas it may thus acquire greater oxygenation for the
purpose of producing greater powers of sensibility, according to a
doctrine lately advanced by a French philosopher, who has endeavoured to
shew that the oxygene, or base of vital air, is the constituent
principle of our power of sensibility.

From this provision of honey for the male and female parts of flowers,
and from the provision of sugar, starch, oil, and mucilage, in the
fruits, seed-cotyledons, roots, and buds of plants laid up for the
nutriment of the expanding fetus, not only a very numerous class of
insects, but a great part of the larger animals procure their food; and
thus enjoy life and pleasure without producing pain to others, for these
seeds or eggs with the nutriment laid up in them are not yet endued with
sensitive life.

The secretions from various vegetable glands hardened in the air produce
gums, resins, and various kinds of saccharine, saponaceous, and wax-like
substances, as the gum of cherry or plumb-trees, gum tragacanth from the
astragalus tragacantha, camphor from the laurus camphora, elemi from
amyris elemifera, aneme from hymenoea courbaril, turpentine from
pistacia terebinthus, balsam of Mecca from the buds of amyris
opobalsamum, branches of which are placed in the temples of the East on
account of their fragrance, the wood is called xylobalsamum, and the
fruit carpobalsamum; aloe from a plant of the same name; myrrh from a
plant not yet described; the remarkably elastic resin is brought into
Europe principally in the form of flasks, which look like black leather,
and are wonderfully elastic, and not penetrable by water, rectified
ether dissolves it; its flexibility is encreased by warmth and destroyed
by cold; the tree which yields this juice is the jatropha elastica, it
grows in Guaiana and the neighbouring tracts of America; its juice is
said to resemble wax in becoming soft by heat, but that it acquires no
elasticity till that property is communicated to it by a secret art,
after which it is poured into moulds and well dried and can no longer be
rendered fluid by heat. Mr. de la Borde physician at Cayenne has given
this account. Manna is obtained at Naples from the fraxinus ornus, or
manna-ash, it partly issues spontaneously, which is preferred, and
partly exsudes from wounds made purposely in the month of August, many
other plants yield manna more sparingly; sugar is properly made from the
saccharum officinale, or sugar-cane, but is found in the roots of beet
and many other plants; American wax is obtained from the myrica
cerifera, candle-berry myrtle, the berries are boiled in water and a
green wax separates, with luke-warm water the wax is yellow: the seed of
croton sebiferum are lodged in tallow; there are many other vegetable
exsudations used in the various arts of dyeing, varnishing, tanning,
lacquering, and which supply the shop of the druggist with medicines and
with poisons.

There is another analogy, which would seem to associate plants with
animals, and which perhaps belongs to this Note on Glandulation, I mean
the similarity of their digestive powers. In the roots of growing
vegetables, as in the process of making malt, the farinaceous part of
the seed is converted into sugar by the vegetable power of digestion in
the same manner as the farinaceous matter of seeds are converted into
sweet chyle by the animal digestion. The sap-juice which rises in the
vernal months from the roots of trees through the alburnum or sap-wood,
owes its sweetness I suppose to a similar digestive power of the
absorbent system of the young buds. This exists in many vegetables in
great abundance as in vines, sycamore, birch, and most abundantly in the
palm-tree, (Isert's Voyage to Guinea,) and seems to be a similar fluid
in all plants, as chyle is similar in all animals.

Hence as the digested food of vegetables consists principally of sugar,
and from that is produced again their mucilage, starch, and oil, and
since animals are sustained by these vegetable productions, it would
seem that the sugar-making process carried on in vegetable vessels was
the great source of life to all organized beings. And that if our
improved chemistry should ever discover the art of making sugar from
fossile or aerial matter without the assistance of vegetation, food for
animals would then become as plentiful as water, and mankind might live
upon the earth as thick as blades of grass, with no restraint to their
numbers but the want of local room.

It would seem that roots fixed in the earth, and leaves innumerable
waving in the air were necessary for the decomposition of water, and the
conversion of it into saccharine matter, which would have been not only
cumberous but totally incompatible with the locomotion of animal bodies.
For how could a man or quadruped have carried on his head or back a
forest of leaves, or have had long branching lacteal or absorbent
vessels terminating in the earth? Animals therefore subsist on
vegetables; that is, they take the matter so far prepared, and have
organs to prepare it further for the purposes of higher animation, and
greater sensibility. In the same manner the apparatus of green leaves
and long roots were found inconvenient for the more animated and
sensitive parts of vegetable-flowers, I mean the anthers and stigmas,
which are therefore separate beings, endued with the passion and power
of reproduction, with lungs of their own, and fed with honey, a food
ready prepared by the long roots and green leaves of the plant, and
presented to their absorbent mouths.

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