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.

中文翻译：

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John Hill (1716–1775) 关于“植物睡眠”：实验生理学和比较分析的局限性

“植物睡眠”现象——即蔬菜每天有节奏地打开和关闭它们的叶子或花瓣——一直是那些对植物感兴趣的人的持续魅力来源，来自葡萄牙医生 Cristóbal Acosta 和意大利博物学家 Prospero Alpini 在 16 世纪19 世纪，珀西·比希·雪莱和查尔斯·达尔文。但直到 1757 年，这个话题才在英国海岸得到了最早的系统性处理，由杰出的作家、植物学家、演员和皇家学会评论家约翰·希尔 (John Hill) 撰写的《植物的睡眠和敏感植物的运动原因》(The Sleep of Plants, Cause of Motion in the Sensitive Plant)。正如本文旨在说明的那样，希尔和他的受访者使用某些植物表现出的这种非凡行为作为重新评估蔬菜性质的镜头，并解决更广泛的自然哲学意义的紧迫问题，特别是植物和动物的结构和功能之间的连续性程度，以及类似的机制是否必然解释不同生命形式的相关运动。本文认为，这些争论对进行实验的正确方法、从观察中推断出的可接受程度以及因果解释的状态也具有深远的方法论意义。