Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 46.djvu/105

Rh of the old block by exhibiting some mannerism or peculiarity of the father. Apparently the male points are as easily inherited as the female points, and most certainly when the male tendencies are most evident, then the female tendencies are more or less in abeyance, and vice versa, and these variabilities may of course occur at any period of the being's existence, often, alas! when least desired. It has been disputed whether the female points of a plant are not more readily inherited than the male. A few years ago it was stated that the chances were as much as three to one in favor of the female side. Messrs. Sutton's foreman has experimented on these lines, particularly with wild potatoes and a cross with gloxinias. He seems convinced that the hereditary traits of the male are shown as often and as decisively as those of the female. But he is also convinced that, while the staminal tendencies are to the fore, the pistillate tendencies are more or less in abeyance. For a considerable period of the plant's growth he has noted nothing but the male tendencies; suddenly the whole bearings of the plant have changed, the staminal tendencies have absolutely died off, and a plant with all the traits of its mother rapidly shows up in its place.

The reasons why a plant should always be called a plant, and an animal an animal, are not always very apparent. An animal is a conscious being. I mean that it knows how to discriminate between this and that, reasons about what is good for it, rejects what experience has informed it is not good for it, and has special sencessenses [sic]. It is a conscious being—indeed reasons, discriminates. Here is a great gulf between the animal and the plant! Most of us are ready to acknowledge such simple truths, and we are all wrong, for the differences when sifted are only those of a greater and lesser degree. Some plants like shade, some like light. Why? Well, why do we under some circumstances prefer dark, and under others light? When we are healthy we can digest meat, and reject, with good reason, a meal of sticks and stones. A carnivorous plant receives and digests a proportionate meat meal, but feed it with pebbles and bits of stick, and it refuses to receive such dainties. We bend beneath a blow, we protect ourselves from further injuries that we judge may follow—so do the sensitive plants. With the aid of a specialist in this class of work I am trying to demonstrate the presence of nervous tissue in plants. So far, we have not been successful, but the circumstantial evidence is so strong that we may feel quite certain that better methods of demonstration will give ocular evidence of what we seek. The proofs of the struggle for existence in both animal and plant life have been prettily told by Taylor.

The part that color and get-up plays in the propagation of species is precisely analogous, alike in the doings of man, the