226 LIFE IN DEATH, AS MANIFEST 



face these realities. In fact, plants are said to be even more 

 sensitive to variations in temperature than animals. 



Thus, from the rustle of the drying leaves, even before they fall, 

 we hear once more the old story of that adaptation to environment, 

 which characterises all life. Trees, as well as men, must find 

 how to endure through winter if they would luxuriate in suuimer. 

 Spring's apparently new created vigour, and the seeming decay of 

 autumn are, after all, only the natural steps whereby the transition 

 from one adapted condition to another is gently broken. 



Plants are, moreover, in a somewhat worse case than animals, 

 seeing that they have no power to transport themselves from one 

 region to another. The genus, or even the species, may gradually 

 migrate to pastures fresh through the kindly free-porterage of seed 

 by wind or insects. But the individual plant or tree must live or 

 die where it stands rooted in the soil. Without a root there is 

 for it no life, but with the root no travelling. 



In these days we know happily how easy animal locomotion 

 permits the debiUtated city merchant and the weary brain- 

 worker to seek bracing air by the seaside. The consumptive 

 patient can prolong life by removing his bodily apparatus to 

 Grand Canary or Madeira. Not so the plant. It must remain 

 in situ. The tonic, or preservative, of change of clime, cannot 

 enter into its pharmacopseia. Whatever comes or goes, it must 

 face all in patience. It must adapt itself to environment, or 

 cease to be. 



This brief biological preamble is really necessary to our 

 present study. For it conveys the essential principle of that 

 whole phenomenon before us which most people so easily ascribe 

 to death and gravitation. As a matter of fact, the latter has next 

 to nothing, and the former quite nothing, to do with it. The falling 

 is a mere trifle in the matter. And the process is entirely a vital 

 one ; the decay of the separated leaf being but a following 

 accident, which may here be left out of account. Before the 

 separation it is so genuine a case of euthanasia as to refuse to be 

 worthily called death. There are, at least, three distinct vital 

 processes concerned in falling leaves, and these all based upon a 

 definite principle which is nowhere in nature more wonderfully 

 and instructively exhibited. 



