creatures, and the children of the same God as myself, and, like myself, it is to be presumed, endowed with the faculty, though possibly in a much fainter degree, of enjoying the world in which His love and goodness have placed both them and me. They breathe, they perspire, they sleep, they feed themselves, and may be overfed; they are male and female. If science admits all these facts, how can it logically stop short at such a definition as that of Linnæus, and deny them sensation? Darwin, in his philosophical poem, the "Botanic Garden” (not much read in the present day), fancifully describes the Loves of the Flowers, and imagines, not perhaps wrongly, that love-making may be as agreeable to them as it is to higher organisations:

What beaux and beauties crowd the gaudy groves,
And woo and win their vegetable loves!
Here snowdrops cold and blue-eyed harebells blend
Their tender tears as o'er the stream they bend;
The love-sick violet and the primrose, pale,
Bow their sweet heads, and whisper to the gale;
With secret sighs, the virgin lily droops,
And jealous cowslips hang their tawny cups;
And the young rose, in beauty's damask pride,
Drinks the warm blushes of his bashful bride;
With honey lips, enamoured woodbines meet,
Clasp with fond arms, and mix their kisses sweet.

This may be thought an idle dream, unworthy of serious, or, more especially, of scientific considera

tion; while some very matter-of-fact persons may ask, how there can be sensation without senses? It is true that flowers have no organs of sight, or hearing, or taste, or smell, that man can discover; but they may, nevertheless, possess a very delicate sense of touch. And how much intelligence may display itself, without any other sense than this, is known to every one who has read the remarkable story of Laura Bridgeman. In her earliest infancy, this unhappy person lost her eyes, her ears, her palate; every door of the inner spirit leading to the outer world of life and humanity, save the one door of touch. But through that door, by the patient sagacity and untiring kindliness of Dr. Howe, of Boston, Massachusetts, the resident physician of the Blind Asylum, to which she was consigned as a patient of whom there was no hope, she was enabled to communicate her wants, her wishes, her hopes, and her ideas to her fellow-creatures, and to share, to some extent, in the knowledge and the civilization of her time. Though she can neither see nor hear, nor articulate, nor remember the time when her eyes were open to the light, she can talk with her fingers, and receive responses through the same medium. Though the great world of sound and the joyous world of music are as alien to her as invisible planets on the uttermost verge of sidereal space, yet, by means of the one sense mercifully

left to her-that of touch-she is able to distinguish her friends and acquaintances the one from the other, and to enjoy music, by means of the vibration through her sensitive and delicate nerves, of the rhythmic pulsations of the air caused by the great organ in the hall of the asylum, which throb through her whole body, giving her a palpable pleasure, possibly as great to her as that which more fortunate persons can derive from the sense of hearing. "Little chinks let in much light," says the ancient proverb; and through the one little chink of feeling, touch, or sensation, the intelligence of Laura Bridgeman can both act and be acted upon. And if it be granted that the trees, the plants, and the flowers possess this one sense-and who can prove that they do not?—may we not reasonably suppose that some degree of intelligence and capacity for pleasure and pain go along with it?

Being a systematic man, although a very busy one, I always find that I have time to spare for my amusement. I also find that my amusement often assumes the shape of a new variety of work, and that when I have had enough of work that I am compelled to do, I take a turn at some other kind of work, to which nothing compels me but my own love for it. In this manner I have become a student of natural history; and whenever I walk in my garden, or through the green lanes and country

roads, over the meadow path, or through the woods, I always discover something to interest me in the phenomena of Nature, animate and inanimate. I have educated my eyes as well as my mind, in remembrance of the sage maxim, "that in every object there is inexhaustible meaning; and that the eye always sees what the eye brings the means of seeing." And last summer in my garden, when resting and amusing myself after protracted mental labour, I made the acquaintance of a very respectable, and as I found reason to believe, a very intelligent plant, and studied its growth and its movements during two or three weeks. The plant was Cucurbita ovifera, known to market-gardeners and housekeepers as the vegetable marrow. This, like all of its genus, will creep along the ground if it find nothing up which it can climb; but if there be a tree, a branch, a pole, or a wall within easy reach, it will infallibly make its way to it, and twine its tendrils round the most available points of support. The vegetable marrow, like the vine, the hop, the briony, and all other varieties of the genus vitis, is, to use the words of Barry Cornwall, applied to her more renowned sister the grape-vine, one "who weareth a hundred rings and a roamer o'er wall and tree." I noticed that this particular plant extended its tendrils outwards, and away from the trunk of a hazel, and from a box-hedge of about seven feet

high, and towards a gravel path. It persevered in extending itself in this direction for three days, after I first began to take notice of it; but on the fourth morning I perceived that it had changed the course which its tendrils were pursuing, and had turned them in the contrary direction towards the box-hedge. In two days more it had securely fastened itself to the hedge with its old tendrils, and put forth new a short distance higher up, with which also in due time it enveloped the supporting tree, which, for the first portion of its life, it had sought in the wrong direction. Another marrow, further removed from all support, had also put forth its feelers towards the gravel path, but finding nothing to lay hold of, turned them back in a similar manner; but like the first one, only to meet with a disappointment. The marrow, however, made the best of unfavourable circumstances, as a wise man and a wise plant should do, and meeting with the tendrils of a sister or a brother marrow engaged in the like pursuit of a prop under difficulties, they resolved apparently that, as union was strength, they would twist around each other. And they did After they had been intertwined for a day, I deliberately and very tenderly removed them, with such care as not to injure the tender stalks and tendrils, and laid them apart on the ground. In less than twenty-four hours they had found each other

so.