18 The Romance of Wild Flowers 
sensitiveness to touch, but also the power of free 
locomotion. There are plants that catch living 
animals and put them to death, afterwards digesting 
and assimilating their victims. There are organisms 
in the lower ranges of life that are at once so plant- 
like and so animal-like that botanist and zoologist 
both claim them as subjects. There are others whose 
vegetable nature would scarcely have been suspected 
but for the distinctly modern practice of closely 
observing and studying the developmental changes 
of organisms. Plants we now know to be sensitive 
to hght, to atmospheric conditions, and in certain 
cases to be able to distinguish between different 
classes of matter regarded from the chemical stand- 
point. 
Then, too, respecting flowers, recent research has 
enabled us to take a higher view of their import- 
ance. The characteristically conceited notion man 
cherished for ages respecting them was that their 
raison Wétre was to please him by their forms, their 
colours, and their perfumes, and the desert flower 
that was born to blush unseen “ wasted” its fragrance 
because no man passed that way. We of to-day 
know that the desert flower and its ancestors were 
efficiently performing their functions in the 
machinery of the universe though for a thousand 
years or more no man had come within sight. Were 
flowers capable of doing reverence, it is not man they 
would acknowledge as lord, but the bee or butterfly. 
For these humble creatures—ignorant no doubt of 
their importance—does the flower develop its most 
brilliant tints; for these it distils its choicest nectar, 
and flings abroad the sweetest odours; for these it 
