Consciousness in Plants. 341 
for continual repose would be followed by sub-consciousness, 
and later by unconsciousness. Such appears to be largely 
the history of degeneracy everywhere, and such is, perhaps, 
in a great measure the history of the entire vegetable king- 
dom, for plants, from their ability to manufacture protoplasm 
from inorganic substances, do not bodily move about in 
quest of food as animals generally do, and therefore require 
no conscious conditions, it would seem, to guide their move- 
ments. They become fixed, and their entire organization, 
except in specialized instances, becomes monopolized by the 
functions of nutrition and reproduction. Their movements 
are mostly rhythmic or rotary, but that they exhibit the 
quality of impromptu design more frequently than scientists 
are willing to allow must be admitted, or facts and the con- 
clusions which naturally flow therefrom constitute no cri- 
teria of judging. Too much stress, I fear, is placed in these 
days upon the action of certain supposed forces that are resi- 
dent in the plant’s or animal’s environment in accounting for 
its behavior, to the utter exclusion of any energy that may 
be acting from within the organism itself. ‘“ That conscious- 
ness as well as life preceded organism, and has been the 
primum mobile in the creation of organic structure,” as Cope 
assumes, there is no doubt; but that it early abandoned the 
vegetable world, and also that all the energies of vegetable 
protoplasm soon became automatic, causing plants in general 
to become sessile, and therefore parasitic and in one sense 
degenerate, I cannot wholly accept. That insects have, in 
the matter of evolution of plant-types, exerted considerable 
influence on the conditions of almost all of their organs, the 
forms of the organs of fructification and especially of the 
flowers, through certain stimuli and strains to which they 
have become subjected by reason of these insects and their 
occupancy of parts as dwelling-places, there can be no doubt ; 
and it is probable also, as has been maintained, that we owe 
to insects, directly or indirectly, not only the forms, but also 
the colors of the flowers, and their odors and peculiar 
