Consciousness in Plants. 341 



for continual repose would be followed by sub-consciousness, 

 and later by unconsciousness. Such appears to be largely 

 the history of degeneracy everywhere, and such is, perhaps, 

 in a great measure the history of the entire vegetable king- 

 dom, for plants, from their ability to manufacture protoplasm 

 from inorganic substances, do not bodily move about in 

 quest of food as animals generally do, and therefore require 

 no conscious conditions, it would seem, to guide their move- 

 ments. They become fixed, and their entire organization, 

 except in specialized instances, becomes monopolized by the 

 functions of nutrition and reproduction. Their movements 

 are mostly rhythmic or rotary, but that they exhibit the 

 quality of impromptu design more frequently than scientists 

 are willing to allow must be admitted, or facts and the con- 

 clusions which naturally flow therefrom constitute no cri- 

 teria of judging. Too much stress, I fear, is placed in these 

 days upon the action of certain supposed forces that are resi- 

 dent in the plant's or animal's environment in accounting for 

 its behavior, to the utter exclusion of any energy that may 

 be acting from within the organism itself. " That conscious- 

 ness as well as life preceded organism, and has been the 

 primum mobile in the creation of organic structure," as Cope 

 assumes, there is no doubt ; but that it early abandoned the 

 vegetable world, and also that all the energies of vegetable 

 protoplasm soon became automatic, causing plants in general 

 to become sessile, and therefore parasitic and in one sense 

 degenerate, I cannot wholly accept. That insects have, in 

 the matter of evolution of plant-types, exerted considerable 

 influence on the conditions of almost all of their organs, the 

 forms of the organs of fructification and especially of the 

 flowers, through certain stimuli and strains to which they 

 have become subjected by reason of these insects and their 

 occupancy of parts as dwelling-places, there can be no doubt ; 

 and it is probable also, as has been maintained, that we owe 

 to insects, directly or indirectly, not only the forms, but also 

 the colors of the flowers, and their odors and peculiar 



