176 From Matter to Man. 



By thus revealing plant life to be merely a special 

 manifestation of normal plant energy, automatically 

 altered by the constituents of the plants themselves 

 to suit the special conditions of its growth, we rob the 

 problem of life of all its paltry mystery, shatter the 

 fabrics which have ever led the unscrupulous to batten 

 on the credulous, and inaugurate a new era of human 

 existence which shall revolutionise the world. 



Section 9. The Evolution of Vegetal Intelligence : 

 In a general survey of plants we seem to observe a 

 gradation of intelligence from, say, the unicellular 

 snow-plant or fungus to the orchid and sun-dew. 

 This intelligence corresponds more or less with the 

 complexity of the plant's mechanism, and especially 

 with the complexity of its nervous tissues. Thus, 

 Huxley averred that the nerve fibres of animals and 

 the nervous tissues of plants were alike but " linear 

 tracts of protoplasm which served as media of com- 

 munication between two points," thus levelling the 

 life and intelligence of plants and animals to the 

 same plane. 



From our demonstration that every plant is a 

 living magnet deriving its energy from a natural 

 magnetic battery, all the mechanism connected there- 

 with must be more or less arranged on, and controlled 

 by, what we may term electric telegraph principles. 

 The tracts of protoplasm are but the telegraph wires 

 along which the messages are sent and returned ; 

 while the complexity of the message and its answer 



