THE OTTAWA NATURALIST 



VOL. XXIV. OTTAWA, OCTOBER, 1910 No. 7 



PLANT PHYSIOLOGY VERSUS PSYCHOLOGY. 



By H. T. Gussow, Dominion Botanist. Ottawa. 



When an infant of tender years performs spontaneously 

 some purely instinctive feat, proud parents wonder at his early 

 manifestation of intellect. When he succeeds in calculating, in 

 reasoning, we take it as a matter of course as the awakening of 

 intellect. Intellect is said to be the power of the human soul 

 by which it comprehends, as distinguished from will power and 

 senses of touch, hearing, etc. Homo sapiens is the only animal 

 possessing a soul ; a soul by which we distinguish between good 

 and evil, for this knowledge is absent in other animals. 

 Animals have a similar faculty, namely instinct. Now, this 

 term is used to describe actions which are spontaneous, which 

 are a natural desire arising in the mind. The difference 

 between intellect and instinct I understand indicates a certain 

 faculty of forethought present in intellectual beings, in human 

 beings, which when only spontaneously or involuntarily dictated 

 becomes instinct. It has been shown that no amount of training 

 is capable of developing this power of discrimination acting 

 properly in the proper place in even the most intelligent of 

 animals. It is a long recognized fact that man and all other 

 animals possess certain gifts which make them totally different 

 from any other organic being. 



In these more highly developed forms of creation we can 

 locate the motive power in the nerve centres, which regulate 

 physical and psychical functions or impulses. Although plants are 

 all more or less capable of certain striking reactionary movements, 

 which testify that they possess the sense of feeling {Dioncsa, Mim- 

 osa, etc.), yet in the absence of nerve centres acting upon 

 a well organized nervous and muscular system we are inclined 

 to regard these functions as merely responding to local irritation. 

 But when regarding really sensible movements of which some 

 plants are capable so capable that they become perceptible 

 to the observer then we do not for a moment consider the 



