INTELLIGENCE OF FLOWERS 



blossom, resembling quaint little mouths with more or less 

 swollen lips and palates streaked with orange or rust-red lines. 

 During the months of June, July and August, they display 

 their bright colours amid the vegetable decay around them, 

 while rising gracefully above the muddy water. But 

 fertilization has been effected, the fruit develops, the action 

 is reversed : the ambient water presses upon the valve of the 

 utricles, forces it in, rushes into the cavity, weighs down the 

 plant and compels it to descend to the mud again." 



Is it not interesting to see thus gathered in this immemo- 

 rial little apparatus some of the most fruitful and most recent 

 human inventions: the play of valves or plugs, the pressure 

 of fluids and the air, the Archimedean principle studied and 

 turned to account? As the author whom we have just quoted 

 observes, "the engineer who first attached a rafting apparatus 

 to a sunken ship little thought that a similar process had been 

 in use for thousands of years." In a world which we believe 

 unconscious and destitute of intelligence, we begin by imagin- 

 ing that the least of our ideas creates new combinations and 

 relations. When we come to look into things more closely, it 

 appears infinitely probable that it is impossible for us to create 



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