The Plant's Response 187 



gates of the morning, when the sun rises in his strength ; 

 we have all this apart from life and its ways. Now so 

 far as terrestrial happiness is concerned, man's aesthetic 

 sense seems to me almost his best endowment. But the 

 aesthetic appreciation of color seems, however, secondary ; 

 the human eye has long been habituated to discover 

 beauty in color before it will once consent to dwell with 

 satisfaction upon the glory of the sinking sun. The con- 

 fectioners tell us that children prefer candy with red 

 stripes ; notice, no man ever thought of decorating candy 

 with green stripes ; not for children. And so it happens 

 that millions of people savage and civilized alike, see 

 beauty in flowers and fruit, and butterflies and birds in 

 brilliant colors all arrayed, who have never noticed a 

 sunset or possibly even thought the rainbow worth look- 

 ing at at all. 



Our appreciation of beautiful things in this world 

 may have been extremely utilitarian in the outset. The 

 birds had already summoned forth the purple of the 

 grape, the gold of the orange, the scarlet of the cherry, 

 before ever man had a thought of these things, before he 

 ever existed at all; and man's first interest in these 

 things as objects of color lay in the fact that the brilliant 

 tints proclaimed his food. Hence it is that the baby 

 likes red candy, while nobody has thought of making 

 such things green green never suggested food to any- 

 body save perchance to Nebuchadnezzar and such lov- 

 ers of salad but that was in the years of his misfortune. 

 Nevertheless, we all know that we have long since passed 

 that stage of human culture where beauty of form or color 

 is associated in the mind, at least consciously, with the 



