CONCLUSION. 299 



To no one of the several workers in this field are we 

 more indebted for the change which has been brought 

 about in this respect than to my late valued and 

 lamented friend Mr. Alfred Tylor. Mr. Tylor was not 

 the discoverer of the protoplasmic continuity that exists 

 in plants, but he was among the very first to welcome 

 this discovery, and his experiments at Carshalton in the 

 years 1883 and 1 884 demonstrated that, whether there 

 was protoplasmic continuity in plants or no, they were 

 at any rate endowed with some measure of reason, fore- 

 thought, and power of self-adaptation to varying sur- 

 roundings. It is not for me to give the details of these 

 experiments. I had the good fortune to see them more 

 than once while they were in progress, and was present 

 when they were made the subject of a paper read by 

 Mr. Sydney B. J. Skertchly before the Linnean Society, 

 Mr. Tylor being then too ill to read it himself. The 

 paper has since been edited by Mr. Skertchly, and 

 published.* Anything that should be said further 

 about it will come best from Mr. Skertchly ; it will be 

 enough here if I give the r4sum6 of it prepared by 

 Mr. Tylor himself. 



In this Mr. Tylor said : — " The principles which 

 underlie this paper are the individuality of plants, 

 the necessity for some co-ordinating system to enable 

 the parts to act in concert, and the probability that 

 this also necessitates the admission that plants have a 

 dim sort of intelligence. 



'' It is shown that a tree, for example, is something 



* On the Growth of Trees and Protoplasmic Continuity, London 

 Stanford, 1886. 



