Among the points with which it was most incumbent upon me to deal was that of vegetable intelligence. A reader may well say that unless I give plants much the same sense of pleasure and pain, memory, power of will, and intelligent perception of the best way in which to employ their opportunities that I give to low animals, my argument falls to the ground. If I declare organic modification to be mainly due to function, and hence in the closest correlation with mental change, I must give plants, as well as animals, a mind, and endow them with power to reflect and reason upon all that most concerns them. Many who will feel little difficulty about admitting that 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 understanding 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 continuity 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 Linnean Society, Mr. Tylor being then too ill to read it himself. The paper has since been edited by Mr. Skertchly, and published. { 253a} Anything that should be said further about it will come best from Mr. Skertchly; it will be enough here if I give the _résumé_ of it prepared by Mr. Tylor himself.