WAYS OF NATURE 



raspberry bush. A few weeks ago its branches 

 curved upward, with their ends swinging fully two 

 feet above the ground; now those ends are thrust 

 down through the weeds and are fast rooted to 

 the soil. Did the raspberry bush think, or choose 

 what it should do ? Did it reflect and say, Now 

 is the time for me to bend down and thrust my tip 

 into the ground ? To all intents and purposes yes, 

 yet there was no voluntary mental process, as in 

 similar acts of our own. We say its nature prompts 

 it to act thus and thus, and that is all the explana 

 tion we can give. Or take the case of the pine or the 

 spruce tree tha,t loses its central and leading shoot. 

 When this happens, does the tree start a new bud 

 and then develop a new shoot to take the place of 

 the lost leader ? No, a branch from the first ring of 

 branches below, probably the most vigorous of the 

 whorl, is promoted to the leadership. Slowly it rises 

 up, and in two or three years it reaches the upright 

 position and is leading the tree upward. This, I 

 suspect, is just as much an act of conscious intelli 

 gence and of reason as is much to which we are 

 so inclined to apply those words in animal life. I 

 suppose it is all foreordained in the economy of 

 the tree, if we could penetrate that economy. It is 

 in this sense that Nature thinks in the animal, and 

 the vegetable, and the mineral worlds. Her think 

 ing is more flexible and adaptive in the vegetable 

 than in the mineral, and more so in the animal 

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