nguished followers, have insisted that the plants
have neither a nervous system, nor anything analogous to the nervous
impulse of the animal. According to such a view, that two streams of
life, in plant and animal, flow side by side, but under the guidance of
different laws. The problems of vegetable life are, it must be said,
extremely obscure, and for the penetrating of that darkness we have long
had to wait for instruments of a superlative sensitiveness. This has
been the principal reason for our long clinging to mere theory, instead
of looking for the demonstration of facts. But to learn the truth we
have to put aside theories, and rely only on direct experiment. We have
to abandon all our preconceptions, and put our questions direct,
insisting that the only evidence we can accept is that which bears the
plant's own signature.

How are we to know what unseen changes take place within the plant? If
it be excited or depressed by some special circumstance, how are we, on
the outside, to be made aware of this? The only conceivable way would
be, if that were possible, to detect and measure the actual response of
the organism to a definite external blow. When an animal receives an
external shock it may answer in various ways if it has voice, by a cry;
if it be dumb, by the movement of its limbs. The external shock is a
stimulus; the answer of the organism is the response. If we can find out
the relation between this stimulus and the response, we shall be able to
determine the vitality of the plant at that moment. In an excitable
condition, the feeblest stimulus will evoke an extraordinarily large
response: in a depressed state, even a strong stimulus evokes only a
feeble response; and lastly, when death has overcome life, there is an
abrupt end of the power to answer at all.

We might therefore have detected the internal condition of the plant,
if, by some inducement, we could have made it write down its own
responses. If we could once succeed in this apparently impossible task
we should still have to learn the new language and the new script. In a
world of so many different scripts, it is certainly undesirable to
introduce a new one! I fear the Uniform Script Association will cherish
a grievance against us for this. It is fortunate however that the
plant-script bears, after all, a certain resemblance to the
Devanagari--inasmuch as it is totally unintelligible to any but the very
learned!

But there are two serious dif