252 Luck, or Cunning ? 
animal modification is upon the whole mainly due to the 
secular cunning of the animals themselves will yet hesitate 
before they admit that plants also can have a reason and 
cunning of their own. 
Unwillingness to concede this is based principally upon 
the error concerning intelligence to which I have already 
referred—I mean to our regarding intelligence not so much 
as the power of understanding as that of being understood 
by ourselves. Once admit that the evidence in favour of a 
plant’s knowing its own business depends more on the 
efficiency with which that business is conducted than either 
on our power of understanding how it can be conducted, 
or on any signs on the plant’s part of a capacity for under- 
standing things that do not concern it, and there will be no 
further difficulty about supposing that in its own sphere a 
plant is just as intelligent as an animal, and keeps a sharp 
look-out upon its own interests, however indifferent it may 
seem to be to ours. So strong has been the set of recent 
opinion in this direction that with botanists the foregoing 
now almost goes without saying, though few five years ago 
would have accepted it. 
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 1884 
demonstrated that, whether there was protoplasmic con- 
tinuity in plants or no, they were at any rate endowed with 
some measure of reason, forethought, and power of self- 
adaptation to varying surroundings. 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 
