INTELLIGENCE OF FLOWERS 



light and heat, while a hidden canker gnawed deep into the 

 tragic arm that supported it in space. Then, obeying I know 

 not what instinctive promptings, two stout roots, two fibrous 

 cables, issuing from the trunk at more than two feet above 

 the elbow, had come to moor it to the granite wall. Had they 

 really been evoked by the tree's distress or were they perhaps 

 waiting providently, from the first day, for the acute hour of 

 danger, in order to increase the value of their assistance? 

 Was it only a happy accident? What human eye will ever 

 assist at these silent dramas, which are all too long for our 

 brief lives? ^ 



Among the vegetals that give the most striking proofs 

 of intelligence and initiative, the plants which might be de- 

 scribed as ^^animated" or ^^sentient" deserve to be studied in 

 detail. I will do no more than recall the delightful tremors 

 of the Sensitive-plant, the shrinking Mimosa with which we 



1 Let us compare with this the act of intelligence of another root, whose exploits 

 are related by Brandis in his Ueber Leben und Polaritdt. In penetrating into the earth, 

 it had come upon an old boot-sole: in order to cross this obstacle, which, apparently, the 

 root was the first of its kind to meet upon its road, it subdivided itself into as many 

 parts as there were holes made in the sole by the cobbler's awl ; then, when the obstacle 

 was overcome, it joined together and once more united all its divided radicles into a 

 single homogeneous tap-root. 



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