LEAF AND TENDRIL 



resources they are; how they manage to shift for 

 themselves, while the cultivated plants are tender 

 and helpless in comparison ! Pull up redroot in your 

 garden and lay it on the ground, and the chances 

 are that one or more rootlets that come in con- 

 tact with the soil will take hold again and enable 

 the plant to mature part of its seeds. This adapta- 

 bility and tenacity of life is, no doubt, the result of 

 the warfare waged against this weed by long gen- 

 erations of gardeners. Natural selection steps in 

 and preserves the most hardy. Of course the indi- 

 vidual animal profits more by experience than the 

 individual plant, yet the individual plant profits 

 also. Do not repeated transplantings make a plant 

 more hardy and increase its chances of surviving? 

 If it does not learn something, it acquires new 

 powers, it profits by adversity. 



IV 



But as the animal is nearer to us than the vege- 

 table, so is animal intelligence nearer akin to our 

 own than plant intelligence. We hear of plant 

 physiology, but not yet of plant psychology. When 

 a plant growing in a darkened room leans toward 

 the light, the leaning, we are taught, is a purely 

 mechanical process, the efifect of the light upon 

 the cells of the plant brings it about in a purely 

 mechanical way; but when an animal is drawn to 

 the light, the process is a much more complex one, 

 172 



