"72 PLANT LIFE. 



The life, or consciousness of life, which we possess, is 

 some sort of resultant of the lives of these cells. If we 

 could imagine a city or a nation to have a real life of its 

 own then we should have a good comparison for the life 

 of a plant. The city or nation occupies its ground and 

 does its work year after year, though the individuals 

 which compose it are always being born, growing up 

 and dying. So in the plant each cell has its own 

 work to do and its own part to fulfil ; its death in 

 no way interferes with the existence of the plant ; in 

 fact very often it is the corpse only of the cell which 

 is useful. 



The development of the cell is wholly governed by 

 the conditions in which it has been placed. Its individual 

 life is entirely subordinated to the welfare of the whole 

 community. One cell may die, and become a fibre or 

 string which gives support and strength to its neighbours; 

 another may become a piece of cork, or be used to hold 

 a crystal ; others again are kept alive for perhaps fifty 

 years and used to form new cells, but they have no 

 choice in the matter. They must become what is most 

 required at that point. Yet there is a continual struggle 

 going on amongst them. Just as one Orange embryo in 

 a seed grows faster and devours all the others, so the 

 cells in any part of a plant are competing for food with 

 one another. Whether they have a community of feeling 

 and mutual understanding or not is doubtful. There is 

 no proved nervous system in plants, and an answer 

 to this question must depend rather on the scientific 

 imagination of the student than upon his power of 

 reasoning from actual facts. It is however the case 

 (as Gardiner has shown) that live cells in a plant 

 are often or always in connection with one another 

 by tiny minute threads of living matter, and, except as 



