INTRODUCTION. 7 



would at once be brought within the category of 

 right and wrong. There is hardly a virtue or a vice 

 which has not its counterpart in the actions of the 

 vegetable kingdom. As regards conduct, in this 

 respect, there is small difference between the lower 

 animals and plants. 



Responsibility is another matter. It can only be 

 attained when consciousness and volition have 

 reached a certain stage of development. Volition, 

 as Professor Cope has recently shown {On the 

 Evolntional Significance 0/ Human Character), is 

 the latest evolved of mental characteristics. Praise 

 and blame, reward and punishment, can only be 

 applied when agents have attained the higher stage 

 of conciousness. Nobody thinks of condemning 

 infants or idiots, and our censure of children and 

 animals is of the mildest kind. The conduct of 

 plants falls still further outside any tribunal of this 

 kind. But it is none the less interesting to find 

 that, as regards the behaviour of vegetable organisms, 

 in common with all other living beings, 



'•' One touch of Nature makes the whole world kin !" 



No botanist, working with the microscope, who 

 has watched the streams of protoplasm ebbing and 

 flowing within the cell, or from vessel to vessel, can 

 feel that plants are the inert and lowly organised 

 objects popular opinion unquestionedly holds them 

 to be. The physiological work constantly going on 

 even in the humblest of vegetable forms is of a highly 



