342 Life and Immortality. 
markings as well. And thus while degeneracy, as observed 
in the abortion of ovules, carpels and perianth, may be seen 
everywhere, which the influences that have acted upon them 
have induced, yet it is the height of presumption to assert 
that consciousness has entirely abandoned the members of 
the vegetable kingdom, and that they are reduced to the 
condition of mere automata. It is true,as has been claimed, 
that the permanent and the successful forms of organization 
have ever been those in which motion and sensibility have 
been preserved, as well as the most highly developed; and 
just as true it is that plants, even though fixed to the soil 
and unable to effect a change of environment in consequence, 
are not so incapable of conscious actions as not to be able to 
meet any changes, and these changes do very often occur, 
that climate, new conditions of soil, helps or hindrances to 
growth and wear, may bring about. That they must adapt 
themselves to such changes, or perish in their struggle to 
exist, none can question. It is not enough to say that 
natural selection affords an explanation of every phenomenon 
that they may exhibit. There is an energy within the plant, 
think and write as we will, and it is this that comes to its 
aid and directs the movement that will be productive of the 
most good. 
Concluding, then, let me aver that no plant can exist or 
fulfil its allotted part in the drama of life without the pos- 
session of some form or degree of consciousness. If it be 
true that life and consciousness preceded organization, and 
the statement can hardly be disputed, and have been the 
primum mobile in the creation of organic structure, what 
reason, seeing that life necessarily persists in vegetable organ- 
ism, can be given for their dissociation in existing forms 
of plants, as seems to be the tendency of modern scientific 
thought? That plants once possessed consciousness, there 
can be no difference of opinion. Well, then, what has 
become of this consciousness? It could not have been 
destroyed, for energy or force, and consciousness certainly 
