VARIOUS MOVEMENTS IN PLANTS 165 



mere prickles or hairs, leaving the swollen stem, which now 

 remains green, to do such slow and limited vegetation as 

 it can in their place whence sometimes its flattening as 

 in the prickly pears, or its ridging in yet more reduced forms. 



Many other forms attract us ; for the plant in its evolu- 

 tion is like Proteus in his changing dance through the 

 world and throughout life, and with the same extreme and 

 dramatic contrasts. Leaving the cactus forms standing 

 immobile like pillars, or lying like stones upon their rocks 

 (sometimes only distinguishable from rocks by the scrutiny 

 needed for mimetic form), we turn to moister situations. 

 Here we may even find a variety of plants increasingly 

 sensitive, up to the Mimosa itself, for which Bose's long 

 years of research serve to express, and to deepen, the 

 age-long wonder of the children of every age since man was 

 intelligent at all. Less conspicuous sensitives there are, 

 which suggestively to evolutionists lead back to the 

 common and passive forms (yet these as Bose has shown 

 merely passive-looking) ; while conversely we also find 

 that further marvel of the Telegraph-plant (Desmodium), 

 which to Bengal children seems to move to the clapping 

 of their hands. It moves child-like, but in its own way: 

 with its restless signal-like leaflets rising and falling by 

 day and night alike, while health endures, and through- 

 out the season. From utmost apparent passivity, then, 

 we find activity more tireless than any animal's, and 

 seeming no less determined from within. 



So we might go on ; but questions meantime have been 

 arising among the students assuming them to be students, 

 and not merely those parrots of the cram-book cage, into 

 which evil enchanters, of Eastern traditions and Western 

 convention alike, have so largely transformed them. The 

 botanist guide is asked at every turn How is this ? And 

 how is that ? How did the seedling shoot grow up, and 

 how does the root go down ? And how of this upset one, 

 trying, and successfully, to right itself anew? The book 

 answer of the crammed parrot is too much like that one 



