John Hill (1714?–1775) on ‘Plant Sleep’: experimental physiology and the limits of comparative analysis

ABSTRACT

The phenomenon of ‘plant sleep’ – whereby vegetables rhythmically open and close their leaves or petals in daily cycles – has been a continual source of fascination for those with botanical interests, from the Portuguese physician Cristóbal Acosta and the Italian naturalist Prospero Alpini in the sixteenth century to Percy Bysshe Shelley and Charles Darwin in the nineteenth. But it was in 1757 that the topic received its earliest systemic treatment on English shores with the prodigious author, botanist, actor, and Royal Society critic John Hill’s The Sleep of Plants, and Cause of Motion in the Sensitive Plant. As the present article aims to illustrate, Hill and his respondents used this remarkable behaviour, exhibited by certain plants, as a lens through which to reassess the nature of vegetables, and to address pressing questions of wider natural philosophical import, particularly the degree of continuity between the structures and functions of plants and animals and whether similar mechanisms necessarily account for related movements in different life forms. These disputes, this paper contends, also had profound methodological implications regarding the proper way to conduct experiments, the extent to which it was acceptable to extrapolate from observations, and the status of causal explanations.

KEYWORDS:

• Royal Society
• history of botany
• John Hill
• experimentation
• natural history

Acknowledgments

Many thanks to an anonymous referee for extremely helpful comments on an earlier draft of this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 For a focus on ‘curiosities’ around the Royal Society at this time, see Palmira Fontes da Costa, The Singular and the Making of Knowledge at the Royal Society of London in the Eighteenth Century (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, 2009).

2 Arthur Lovejoy, The Great Chain of Being: A Study of the History of an Idea (Harvard: Harvard University Press, 1936), p. 231 and James Larson, Interpreting Nature: The Science of Living Form from Linnaeus to Kant (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994), p. 59. The fullest recent study to make this case for the eighteenth century is Susannah Gibson, Animal, Vegetable, Mineral? How Eighteenth-Century Science Disrupted the Natural Order (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015). For works that are orientated towards the bearing that eighteenth-century developments had on nineteenth-century taxonomical practices and even evolutionary theories, see Harriet Ritvo, The Platypus and the Mermaid and Other Figments of the Classifying Imagination (Harvard: Harvard University Press, 1997) and Peter F. Stevens, The Development of Biological Systematics: Antoine-Laurent de Jussieu, Nature, and the Natural System (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994).

3 For Leibniz’s view of natural continuity in particular, see Candice Goad and Susanna Goodin, ‘Monadic Hierarchies and the Great Chain of Being’, Studia Leibnitiana, 29, no. 2 (1997), 129–45; Laurence Carlin, ‘Leibniz’s Great Chain of Being’, Studia Leibnitiana, 32, no. 2 (2000), 131–65; and Lea F. Schweitz, ‘On the Continuity of Nature and the Uniqueness of Human Life in G.W. Leibniz’, in The Life Sciences in Early Modern Philosophy, ed. by Ohad Nachtomy and Justin Smith (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), pp. 205–21.

4 See Staffan Müller-Wille, ‘Linnaeus and the Love Lives of Plants’, in Reproduction: Antiquity to the Present Day, ed. by Nick Hopwood, Rebecca Flemming, and Lauren Kassell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), pp. 305–18. He pushes back against earlier studies that tended to see Linnaeus as a proponent of natural continuity (see, for example, Philip Ritterbush, Overtures to Biology: The Speculations of Eighteenth-Century Naturalists (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1964), pp. 109–21).

5 This is not to make a judgement as to whether Linnaeus, who cited Hales’s view that nutrition comes from the ground, accepted his conclusion regarding the motion of sap, but simply to note that Hales is a likely inspiration for Hill’s more general anti-analogical posture (see Carl Linnaeus, Philosophia Botanica (Vienna, 1755), p. 88).

6 On comparative anatomy, see Francis J. Cole, A History of Comparative Anatomy from Aristotle to the Eighteenth Century (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1944), especially pp. 177–254; François Delaporte, Nature’s Second Kingdom: Explorations of Vegetality in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1982), especially pp. 9–28; Anna Marie Roos, Web of Nature: Martin Lister (1639-1712), the First Arachnologist (Leiden: Brill, 2011), pp. 151–66; and Andrew Cunningham, The Anatomist Anatomis’d: An Experimental Discipline in Enlightenment Europe (Farnham: Ashgate, 2010), pp. 295–360.

7 Peter Anstey and Alberto Vanzo, ‘The Origins of Early Modern Experimental Philosophy’, Intellectual History Review, 22, no. 4 (2012), 499–518 (p. 499). Also see Peter Anstey, ‘Experimental versus Speculative Natural Philosophy’, in The Science of Nature in the Seventeenth Century: Patterns of Change in Early Modern Natural Philosophy, ed. by Peter Anstey and John Schuster (Dordrecht: Springer, 2005), pp. 215–42.

8 On the efforts to uncover borderline species, see Virginia Dawson, Nature’s Enigma: The Problem of the Polyp in the Letters of Bonnet, Trembley and Réaumur (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1987) and Aram Vartanian, ‘Trembley’s Polyp, La Mettrie, and Eighteenth-Century French Materialism’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 11, no. 3 (1950), 259–86.

9 See Horace Walpole to Henry Zouch, 3 January 1761, The Letters and Papers of Sir John Hill, 1714-1775, ed. by George Rousseau (New York: AMS Press, 1980), p. 122.

10 Aristotle, Parva naturalia, 454b25-8. On Aristotle and sleep, the best study remains R.K. Sprague, ‘Aristotle and the Metaphysics of Sleep’, The Review of Metaphysics, 31, no. 2 (1977), 230–41.

11 For a much fuller discussion, see Damian Murphy, ‘Aristotle on Why Plants Cannot Perceive’, Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy, 29 (2005), 295–339.

12 Aristotle, Generation of Animals, 778b35-779a2.

13 Plato, Timaeus, 77b. On Plato’s rather ambiguous views about plants, see Amber Carpenter, ‘Embodied Intelligent (?) Souls: Plants in Plato’s Timaeus’, Phronesis, 55, no. 4 (2010), 281–303.

14 Aristotle, On Plants, 815a25.

15 Aristotle, History of Animals, 588b1-10.

16 See Cristóbal Acosta, Tractado de las drogas, y medicinas de las Indias orientales (Burgos, 1578), pp. 66–72. For the ancient precedent, see Theophrastus, Enquiry into Plants (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1990), IV.viii.8.

17 See Prospero Alpini, De plantis Aegypti liber (Venice, 1592), p. 15.

18 Francis Bacon, Sylva sylvarum (London, 1670), 103. On Bacon’s views on this topic, see Charles Webster, ‘The Recognition of Plant Sensitivity by English Botanists in the Seventeenth Century’, Isis, 57, no. 1 (1966), 5–23 (pp. 10–11).

19 See Jacques-Philippe Cornut, Canadensium Plantarum, aliarúmque nondum editarum historia (Paris, 1635), pp. 171–4.

20 See John Ray, Historia Plantarum (London, 1686), p. 2.

21 John Ray, Historia Plantarum (London, 1688): ‘Folia Sole occidente ut in Acacia aliisque sese contrahere solent, eóque oriente aperire, ut tradit Alpinus. At verò fructum sive siliquam frigoris vitandi causà soliis sese involvere ut Alpinus & Acosta scribunt & miraculi loco habent, mihi cum D. Syen fabulam redolere videtur’ (p. 1748).

22 Pliny the Elder, Natural History, Book 18.79.365-6 and Carl Linnaeus, Flora Lapponica (Amsterdam, 1737), p. 222.

23 Philosophia Botanica, pp. 273–4.

24 Philosophia Botanica, pp. 276–7.

25 British Library, Sloane MS 1326, f. 13v.

26 See Peter Bremer and Carl Linnaeus, Somnus Plantarum in Dissertatione Academica (Uppsala, 1755).

27 See Cambridge University Library, DAR 209.14.

28 Somnus Plantarum, pp. 10–11.

29 Somnus Plantarum, p. 7.

30 For an overview of Hill’s relationship to Linnaeus, including a discussion of Linnaeus’s apparently frosty reception of The Sleep of Plants, see George Rousseau, The Notorious Sir John Hill: The Man Destroyed by Ambition in the Era of Celebrity (Bethlehem, Pa.: Lehigh University Press, 2012), pp. 215–30.

31 John Hill, The Sleep of Plants, and the Cause of Motion in the Sensitive Plant (London, 1757), p. 2.

32 John Hill, The British Herbal (London, 1756), p. 1.

33 On how Linnaeus used erotic language to promote his taxonomical system, see Müller-Wille, ‘Linnaeus and the Love Lives of Plants’.

34 For a fuller discussion of Hill’s taxonomical contributions, see the chapters in Fame & Fortune: Sir John Hill and London Life in the 1750s, ed. by Clare Brant and George Rousseau (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018): Brent Elliott, ‘Sir John Hill as Botanist: The Vegetable System’, 267–90 and Sarah Easterby-Smith, ‘John Hill, Exotic Botany and the Competitive World of Eighteenth-Century Horticulture’, 291–314.

35 For the background to this dispute between the ‘natural’ and ‘artificial’, the seminal paper is P.R. Sloan, ‘John Locke, John Ray, and the Problem of Natural System’, Journal of the History of Biology, 5, no. 1 (1972), 1–53, but also see Staffan Müller-Wille, ‘Systems and How Linnaeus Looked at Them in Retrospect’, Annals of Science, 70, no. 3 (2013), 305–17.

36 Sleep of Plants, p. 6.

37 Sleep of Plants, p. A7v.

38 For an overview of the literature on the well-covered debate between Kant and Herder, see Dalia Nassar, ‘Analogy, Natural History and the Philosophy of Nature: Kant, Herder and the Problem of Empirical Science’, Journal of the Philosophy of History, 9, no. 2 (2015), 240–57. For the prominence of ‘biological’ analogies during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, see Ritterbush, Overtures to Biology, 61–70 and 109–57 along with comments throughout Delaporte, Nature’s Second Kingdom.

39 John Hill, A Review of the Works of the Royal Society of London (London, 1751), pp. 85–6. On Hill’s Review more generally, see George Potter, ‘The Significance to the History of English Natural Science of John Hill’s Review of the Works of the Royal Society’, University of California Publications in English, 14 (1943), 157–80.

40 See Review of the Works of the Royal Society, pp. 89–91 and John Hill, A Decade of Curious and Elegant Trees and Plants (London, 1773), pp. 19–20.

41 Sleep of Plants, pp. 8 and 10–11.

42 Sleep of Plants, p. 8.

43 See Sleep of Plants, p. 13.

44 Sleep of Plants, p. 14.

45 Sleep of Plants, p. 10.

46 See Sleep of Plants, pp. 24–30.

47 Johann Gottfried Zinn, Von dem Schlaf der Pflanzen (Hamburg, 1759), pp. 40–50 and Henri-Louis Duhamel du Monceau, La physique des arbres: où il est traité de l'anatomie des plantes et de l'économie végétale (Paris, 1759), p. 159.

48 Jean Marchant, ‘Observation botanique’, in Histoire de l’Académie royale des sciences avec les mémoires de mathématique et de physique (Paris, 1731), p. 35. Contemporary botanists have taken significant interest in Mairan, though they have consistently misconstrued the conclusion of his experiments: see, for example, William J. Schwartz and Serge Daan, ‘Origins: A Brief Account of the Ancestry of Circadian Biology’, in Biological Timekeeping: Clocks, Rhythms and Behaviour, ed. by Vinod Kumar (New Delhi: Springer, 2017), pp. 3–22.

49 Sleep of Plants, p. 18.

50 Sleep of Plants, p. 18.

51 Especially see Haller’s letters to Johannes Gessner during the early 1750s: The Letters and Papers of Sir John Hill, pp. 36–9.

52 The Letters and Papers of Sir John Hill, p. 138.

53 On Haller and irritability, see Dominique Boury, ‘Irritability and Sensibility: Key Concepts in Assessing the Medical Doctrines of Haller and Bordeu’, Science in Context 21, no. 4 (2008), 521–35 and especially Hubert Steinke, Irritating Experiments: Haller’s Concept and the European Controversy on Irritability and Sensibility, 1750–90 (Amsterdam: Brill, 2005).

54 For how Haller adapted and eventually displaced Glisson’s ideas, see Guido Giglioni, ‘What Ever Happened to Francis Glisson? Albrecht Haller and the Fate of Eighteenth-Century Irritability’, Science in Context, 21, no. 4 (2008), 465–93.

55 But on Haller’s interest in botany, see Luc Lienhard, ‘“La machine botanique”: Zur Entstehung von Hallers Flora der Schweiz’, in Hallers Netz. Ein Europäischer Gelehrtenbriefwechsel zur Zeit der Aufklärung, ed. by Martin Stuber, Stefan Hächler, and Luc Lienhard (Basel: Schwabe, 2005), pp. 371–410 and Jean-Marc Drouin and Luc Lienhard, ‘Botanik’, in Albrecht von Haller. Leben—Werk—Epoche, ed. by Hubert Steinke and Urs Boschung (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2008), ,pp. 292–324. For wider discussions of plant irritability from around this time, see Delaporte, Nature’s Second Kingdom, pp. 149–86.

56 The seminal texts are Lester S. King, ‘Stahl and Hoffmann: A Study in Eighteenth-Century Animism’, Journal of the History of Medicine, 19, no. 2 (1964), 118–30; Theodore M. Brown, ‘From Mechanism to Vitalism in Eighteenth-Century English Physiology’, Journal of the History of Biology, 7, no. 2 (1974), 179–216; and John Yolton, Thinking Matter: Materialism in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983). More recently, Charles Wolfe has written essays such as ‘Vitalism and the Resistance to Experimentation on Life in the Eighteenth Century’, Journal of the History of Biology, 46, no. 2 (2013), 255–82 and ‘Sensibility as Vital Force or as Property of Matter in Mid-Eighteenth-Century Debates’, in The Discourse of Sensibility: The Knowing Body in the Enlightenment, ed. by Henry Martyn Lloyd (New York: Springer, 2013), pp. 147–70.

57 On the relationship between ‘sleeping’ and ‘sensitive’ plants, along with broader attitudes towards the Mimosa pudica at this time, the best study is now Guido Giglioni, ‘Touch Me Not: Sense and Sensibility in Early Modern Botany’, Early Science and Medicine, 23, no. 5–6 (2018), 420–43. Also see Robert Maniquis, ‘The Puzzling “Mimosa”: Sensitivity and Plant Symbols in Romanticism’, Studies in Romanticism, 8, no. 3 (1969), 129–55.

58 Sleep of Plants, p. 7.

59 Sleep of Plants, p. 37.

60 Sleep of Plants, p. 48.

61 For a fuller discussion, see Webster, ‘The Recognition of Plant Sensitivity’.

62 Henry Power to Thomas Brown, Works of Sir Thomas Browne, ed. by Geoffrey Keynes (London, 1928-31), Vol. 6, p. 291.

63 Philosophical and Physical Opinions, 23. See Justin Begley, ‘“The minde is matter moved”: Nehemiah Grew on Margaret Cavendish’, Intellectual History Review, 27, no. 4 (2017), 493–514.

64 While this article focusses on the responses of fellow naturalists, his paper was also reviewed in literary journals, which emphasized the sometimes-overblown tone of his piece: see George Tobias Smollett (ed.), ‘Art. IX. The Sleep of Plants Explained, by Dr. Hill’, The Critical Review, or, Annals of Literature, 4 (1757), 227–30 and Ralph Griffiths (ed.), ‘Hill on the Sleep of Plants’, Monthly Review, or, Literary Journal, 17 (1757), 330–6.

65 See ‘Part of a Letter from Mr. John Browning, of Bristol, to Mr. Henry Baker, Concerning the Effect of Electricity on Vegetables’, Philosophical Transactions, 44 (1746), 373–5 and ‘Extract of a Letter from John Browning; Of Barton-Hill Near Bristol, to Mr. Henry Baker, Concerning a Dwarf’, Philosophical Transactions, 47 (1751), 278–81. Evidence for Browning’s activities is rather sparse, but see his correspondence with Emanuel Mendez da Costa on the nature of fossils found in Dudley, Staffordshire in British Library, Add MS 28535, ff. 193r-95r. While Baker’s epistle to Browning on Hill is absent from Rousseau’s The Letters and Papers of Sir John Hill, it is a powerful source for understanding the way in which Hill’s contemporaries engaged with his ideas; Rousseau has more recently mentioned these letters in The Notorious Sir John Hill, pp. 210–11.

66 Review of the Works of the Royal Society, p. 89. For a broader look at Hill’s criticism of the Society, see Kevin Fraser, ‘John Hill and the Royal Society in the Eighteenth Century’, Notes and Records of the Royal Society of London, 48, no. 1 (1994), 43–67 and Clark Emery, ‘“Sir” John Hill Versus the Royal Society’, Isis, 34, no. 1 (1942), 16–20. For Baker’s expressions of contempt for Hill after 1750, see The Letters and Papers of Sir John Hill, pp. 40–4, pp. 46–7, and p. 49.

67 See Yale University, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Osborn fc109 ½, f. 6.

68 Sleep of Plants, pp. 48–9.

69 Osborn fc109 ½, f. 3.

70 Osborn fc109 ½, f. 3.

71 See Henry Baker, An Attempt Towards a Natural History of the Polype (London, 1743) and ‘An Account of the Sea Polypus’, Philosophical Transactions, 50, no. 2 (1757-8), 777–86.

72 Osborn fc109 ½, f. 4.

73 See Karl H. Dannenfeldt, ‘Sleep: Theory and Practice in the Late Renaissance’, Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences, 41, no. 4 (1986), 415-41 (p. 418 and p. 424).

74 Henry Baker, Employment for the Microscope in Two Parts (London, 1753), pp. 48–9.

75 Osborn fc109 ½, ff. 5-6.

76 Richard Pulteney, ‘Some Observations Upon the Sleep of Plants; And an Account of That Faculty, Which Linnaeus Calls Vigiliae Florum’, Philosophical Transactions, 50 (1757), 506–17 (p. 508).

77 Pulteney, ‘Some Observations’, p. 508.

78 Pulteney, ‘Some Observations’, pp. 509–10.

79 Pulteney, ‘Some Observations’, p. 509.

80 The Letters and Papers of Sir John Hill, p. 80.

81 Pulteney, ‘Some Observations’, p. 507.

82 See Bodleian, MS Eng. misc. e 137, ff. 66-67.

83 See British Library, Add MS 4440, ff. 33v-37v (f. 34v).

84 See The Letters and Papers of Sir John Hill, pp. 79–80.

85 For such a narrative, see Mario Biagioli, ‘From Book Censorship to Academic Peer Review’, Emergences: Journal for the Study of Media & Composite Cultures, 12, no. 1 (2002), 11–45 and Noah Moxham, ‘Fit for Print: Developing an Institutional Model of Scientific Periodical Publishing in England, 1665-ca. 1714’, Notes and Records of the Royal Society, 69, no. 3 (2015), 241–60.

86 See Noah Moxham and Aileen Fyfe, ‘The Royal Society and the Prehistory of Peer Review, 1665–1965’, The Historical Journal, 61, no. 4 (2018), 863–89 (especially pp. 870-1).

87 Francis Bacon, The Instauratio Magna Part II: Novum Organum and Associated Texts, ed. by Graham Rees and Maria Wakely (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), p. 453.

88 William Cavendish and Margaret Cavendish, A Collection of Letters and Poems (London, 1678), pp. 124–5.

89 For a tempered take on the role of experimentation around the Royal Society in the late seventeenth century, see Mordechai Feingold, ‘“Experimental Philosophy”: Invention and Rebirth of a Seventeenth-Century Concept’, Early Science and Medicine, 21, no. 1 (2016), 1–28.

90 Osborn fc109 ½, f. 4.

91 Robert Boyle, Certain Physiological Essays and Other Tracts Written at Distant Times (London, 1661), p. 25.

92 Richard Sorrenson, ‘Towards a History of the Royal Society in the Eighteenth Century’, Notes and Records of the Royal Society of London, 50, no. 1 (1996), 29–46 (p. 36).

93 Review of the Works of the Royal Society, p. v.

94 On the proposed merger of Royal Society with the Society of Antiquaries, see George Rousseau and David Haycock, ‘Voices Calling for Reform: The Royal Society in The Mid-Eighteenth Century – Martin Folkes, John Hill, and William Stukeley’, History of Science, 37, no. 4 (1999), 377–406. The best study of the antiquarian interests around the Royal Society at this time remains Joseph Levine, Dr. Woodward’s Shield: History, Science, and Satire in Augustan England (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977).

95 While Hales is unfortunately understudied, the most significant studies are Anna Marie Roos, The Salt of the Earth: Natural Philosophy, Medicine, and Chymistry in England, 1650–1750 (Leiden: Brill, 2007), pp. 195–206 and Gibson, Animal, Vegetable, Mineral?, pp. 154–50.

96 See Rousseau, The Notorious Sir John Hill, especially pp. 31–64.

97 See Thomas Birch, History of the Royal Society (London, 1756), Vol. 1, p. 3.