CHAPTER XII 
SENSE-LIFE AND SENSIBILITY 
ONE of the most fascinating and yet perhaps the most 
dangerous of all the many insidious temptations to 
which a botanist may be exposed, is that of allowing 
himself to speculate upon the sense-life or soul-life of 
the plant world. 
Plants are undoubtedly alive. Animals and we 
ourselves can appreciate the sunlight. Sunflowers and 
foxgloves also mark their appreciation, and the inference 
that they enjoy it, just as we do, is very difficult to 
resist. An injured root curling itself up reminds us at 
once of a writhing worm, and indeed all through the 
phenomena of plant life one meets with instances 
which, unless one is very careful, lead to what Dr. 
Darwin describes as one of the seven deadly sins of 
science, “anthropomorphism.” 
The answer which is obvious and at first sight con- 
clusive to all such sympathetic theories of plant life is, 
that plants have no nerves and cannot therefore possess 
either consciousness or indeed enjoyment of any kind. 
But is this true either in fact or as a legitimate de- 
duction from what we know of consciousness in the 
animal world ? 
Some years ago a very great discovery was made and, 
as is not unusual even with great botanical discoveries, 
byan Englishman, Mr. Gardiner found that the living 
protoplasmic cells were not,as had alwaysbeen supposed, 
separated from one another by dead walls of cellulose, 
but that tiny minute strands of the same living proto- 
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