ends are thrust down through the
weeds and are fast rooted to the soil. Did the raspberry bush think,
or choose what it should do? Did it reflect and say, Now is the time
for me to bend down and thrust my tip into the ground? To all intents
and purposes yes, yet there was no voluntary mental process, as in
similar acts of our own. We say its nature prompts it to act thus and
thus, and that is all the explanation we can give. Or take the case of
the pine or the spruce tree that loses its central and leading shoot.
When this happens, does the tree start a new bud and then develop a
new shoot to take the place of the lost leader? No, a branch from the
first ring of branches below, probably the most vigorous of the whorl,
is promoted to the leadership. Slowly it rises up, and in two or three
years it reaches the upright position and is leading the tree upward.
This, I suspect, is just as much an act of conscious intelligence and
of reason as is much to which we are so inclined to apply those words
in animal life. I suppose it is all foreordained in the economy of the
tree, if we could penetrate that economy. It is in this sense that
Nature thinks in the animal, and the vegetable, and the mineral
worlds. Her thinking is more flexible and adaptive in the vegetable
than in the mineral, and more so in the animal than in the vegetable,
and the most so of all in the mind of man.

The way the wild apple trees and the red thorn trees in the pasture,
as described by Thoreau, triumph over the cattle that year after year
browse them down, suggests something almost like human tactics. The
cropped and bruised tree, not being allowed to shoot upward, spreads
more and more laterally, thus pushing its enemies farther and farther
away, till, after many years, a shoot starts up from the top of the
thorny, knotted cone, and in one season, protected by this
_cheval-de-frise_, attains a height beyond the reach of the cattle,
and the victory is won. Now the whole push of the large root system
goes into the central shoot and the tree is rapidly developed.

This almost looks like a well-laid scheme on the part of the tree to
defeat its enemies. But see how inevitable the whole process is. Check
the direct flow of a current and it will flow out at the sides; check
the side issues and they will push out on their sides, and so on. So
it is with the tree or seedling. The more it is cropped, the more it
branches and rebranches, pushing out laterally