The sun may spread around a very great and glorious radiance, and a candle may emit a very small glimmer; but there is light in both cases. Man's reasoning powers, and the speech that accompanies them, when compared with the reasoning faculty and the speech of all the inferior inhabitants of the globe, may be as greatly in excess of theirs as the noonday sunshine is in excess of the ray of a farthing candle; but the least particle of reasoning power is reason as far as it extends. What we call instinct is but a kind and degree of reason, and, in a world full of balances and compensations, its very inferiority has its compensation in the fact that, unlike reason, instinct never goes wrong. If animals cannot understand our language unless in very few instances of ordinary occurrence and when accompanied by sign, gesture, and the expression of the eye, neither can we understand their language, except it have the same mute accompaniments. Mr. Emerson says, " that we are wiser than we know;" I say it is possible, that with all our undoubted superiority, and all our pride of intellect, we are not so wise as we think.

THE INTELLIGENCE OF PLANTS.

HATEVER be the exact difference between reason and instinct, which has been rather a puzzling matter for philosophers in all ages, and however much or however little of either faculty may be possessed by men and animals, be the latter large as elephants, eagles, and whales, or small as mice, butterflies, or animalculæ, man clearly admits that these creatures have a certain degree of intelligence which is useful to them. He will not, however, admit this to be true in the case of plants and vegetables, whether as regards reason, instinct, or any minor degree of intelligence whatsoever. The great naturalist, Linnæus, although he was the first to declare and promulgate that plants and flowers, as well as animals, are male and female-a discovery which one would suppose might have led him to acknowledge sensation, if not intelligence, in these living beings, says, in defining the differences between the mineral,

vegetable, and animal kingdoms, " Minerals grow; vegetables grow and live; animals live, grow, and feel." In other words, he asserts that the members of the vegetable world do not " feel." Another and more recent definition sets forth that " a plant is an organised being, unconscious of its own existence, fed by inorganic substances which it extracts from air or water, according to laws independent of the formulæ of organic chemistry, by the help of a faculty dependent on vital force." Are these ideas just, and these definitions correct? I think not, and have been led by observation to believe that plants are conscious of their own existence, and therefore of their own wants, and that they are endowed, not only with feeling or sensation, but with intelligence in such degree as is sufficient to make life pleasant to them, and enable them to take proper measures for its preservation.

When we consider the extreme beauty of plants and flowers, and know from experience that they live, propagate, and die, it seems like setting a presumptuous limit to the divine love of God, to deny that he has given sensation to such lovely creatures. If the oyster fastened upon the rock can feel, why not the rose or the convolvulus, or the great oak-tree that is fast rooted in the ground? The glow of the sunshine or the freshness of the rain and the air that feed plants and vegetables, are they

not agreeable to the plants and vegetables, as things to be felt and enjoyed? Who can tell? Or who shall deny, and give good reason for his incredulity? What philosopher can prove this negation? And, in point of fact, who, however learned he may be, can decide where animal life ends and where vegetable life begins? What, for instance, is a sponge? And if, as Linnæus says, plants have no feeling, what makes the mimosa, or sensitive plant, shrink so timidly from the slightest touch, and apparently with such pain or terror from a ruder blow? Whether I am scientifically and philosophically right or wrong, I take a pleasure in believing that

To every thing that lives,

The kind Creator gives
Share of enjoyment,

and that the possession of life, in however infinitesimal a degree, presupposes in its possessor, whether animal or vegetable, a faculty of sensation that administers to its happiness, and that may consequently administer to its suffering. For pleasure and pain are twins, and the one is not attainable without liability to the other. The idea is not new to poetry, though not accepted by science. blooms and sparkles in the graceful mythology of Greece, and the somewhat less graceful mythology of Rome, as all who remember the Dryads and Hamadryads the loves of Apollo with Laura,

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It

Daphne, and Acantha, or who at school or college have pored over the metaphors of Ovid, will readily admit. The poets of India and Persia delighted to animate the flowers and trees, and, according to Hafiz, the rose appreciates the tender melodies of her lover the nightingale. Greek superstition endowed the atropa mandragora with all the sensations of an animal, and believed that it shrieked with pain when its roots were wrested from the ground.

Science may laugh at all such notions; but Science, though a very great and learned lady, does not know everything, and her elder sister, Poetry, often sees further and deeper into things than she does. Did not Shakespeare, in the "Tempest," foreshadow the possibility of the electric telegraph more than two hundred years before Wheatstone? Did not Dr. Erasmus Darwin, long in advance of James Watt and Robert Stephenson, predict the steamship and the locomotive engine? And did not Coleridge, in the "Ancient Mariner," very clearly explain the modus operandi of the then unsuspected atmospheric railway?

On the question of the intelligence of plants, I must confess that my convictions as well as my sympathies go with the poets rather than with the scientific men. I know that the trees and the flowers, inasmuch as they live, are my fellow