Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 47.djvu/823

Rh a thick hull of loosely woven fibers, which forms a most excellent raft to carry the fruit far over the sea till it is stranded on some island to grow there into a new tree. Hence the cocoa palm is the first settler on all coral reefs that rise above the sea, and becomes the most characteristic element of tropical landscapes.

Other water plants employ animals as means of transport. They are swallowed by fishes, from the intestines of which they pass undigested.

The method of dispersion of many of the Algæ, is especially interesting. They produce wandering cells which, endowed like the infusoria with free motion, shoot around in the water till they find a point on which they can settle themselves and grow. The lens will show us on a stone in the brook or on a dry limb that has fallen into the water a small group of slender threads, perhaps about a third of an inch high, each of which consists of a row of cylindrical cells set one upon another. If we take the plants home, wrapped with their support in round paper or moss, and put them in a dish of fresh water, we shall often be able in a short time to observe the spectacle of the formation of wandering cells. With a microscope we can see the individual cells breaking up and their contents creeping out of the cleft in the form of oval bodies. At the forward end of these swarms we may observe a number of fine threads which swing rapidly back and forth till they acquire a rotary motion, by means of which they swim spirally forward. The Austrian botanist Unger, who was among the first to observe the formation of wandering cells, believed at the time that he had surprised the plants in the act of becoming animals. The vegetable wanderers are, in fact, wonderfully like minute water animals. Many of them have red spots in front, which some have not irrationally supposed were light-perceiving organs or eyes of the simplest sort.

The question whether plants have a consciousness meets us here more impressively than anywhere else in the vegetable kingdom. As we observe how wandering cells swim toward food-stuffs and avoid poisons, seek moderate light and retire from strong light, and distinguish their own likes from the wandering cells of other plants, we find also really no difference. We have to concede that the same feelings and expressions are apparent in both; and if we ascribe a kind of soul to the animals, we can not deny it to the plants. We can not expect to find thought and reason in these circles of simplest light. Those are the prerogatives of the highest inhabitants of earth. The whole existence of these lower beings consists in the unconscious reception of impressions and the unconscious movements occasioned by it. The