WAYS OF NATURE 
raspberry bush. A few weeks ago its branches 
curved upward, with their ends swinging fully two 
feet above the ground; now those ends are thrust 
down through the weeds and are fast rooted to 
the soil. Did the raspberry bush think, or choose 
what it should do? Did it reflect and say, Now 
is the time for me to bend down and thrust my tip 
into the'ground? To all intents and purposes yes, 
yet there was no voluntary mental process, as in 
similar acts of our own. We say its nature prompts 
it to act thus and thus, and that is all the explana- 
tion we can give. Or take the case of the pine or the 
spruce tree that loses its central and leading shoot. 
When this happens, does the tree start a new bud 
and then develop a new shoot to take the place of 
the lost leader? No, a branch from the first ring of 
branches below, probably the most vigorous of the 
whorl, is promoted to the leadership. Slowly it rises 
up, and in two or three years it reaches the upright 
position and is leading the tree upward. This, I 
suspect, is just as much an act of conscious intelli- 
gence and of reason as is much to which we are 
so inclined to apply those words in animal life. I 
suppose it is all foreordained in the economy of 
the tree, if we could penetrate that economy. It is 
in this sense that Nature thinks in the animal, and 
the vegetable, and the mineral worlds. Her think- 
ing is more flexible and adaptive in the vegetable 
than in the mineral, and more so in the animal 
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