How Animals Talk 



given over when the animal (a collection of cells) 

 began to develop special organs of touch, sight, 

 and hearing; but there is no indication that the 

 original power of sensibility has ever been wholly 

 destroyed in any cell. It is, therefore, still within 

 the range of biological possibility that a man 

 should hear with his fingers or smell with his toes, 

 since every cell of both finger and toe once did a 

 work corresponding to the present functions of the 

 five animal senses. 



Before you dismiss this as an idle or impossible 

 theory, try a simple experiment, which may open 

 your eyes to the reality of living things. Go to a 

 greenhouse and select a spot of bare earth under 

 a growing rose-bush. Examine the surface care- 

 fully, then brush and examine it again, to be sure 

 that not a root of any kind is present. Now 

 place a handful of good plant-food on the selected 

 spot, and go away to your own affairs. Return 

 in a week or so, brush aside your "bait," and there 

 before your eyes is a mass of white feeding-roots 

 where no root was before. In some way, deep 

 under the soil, the hungry cells have heard or 

 smelled or felt a rumor of food, and have headed 

 for it as surely as a dog follows his nose to his 

 dinner. 



Do plants, then, know what they do when they 

 turn to the light, and is there something like con- 



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