THE FOURTEENTH CHAPTER
Mirrors for Flowers
When the Doctor noticed how the lilies shrank away from the glow of the matches he became greatly interested in this curious unexpected effect that the extra light had had on them.
“Why, Stubbins,” he whispered, “they could not have felt the heat. We were too far away. If it is the glare that made them draw back it must be that they have some organs so sensitive to light that quite possibly they can see! I must find out about this.”
Thereupon he began questioning the lilies again to discover how much they could tell him of their sense of vision. He shot his hand out and asked them if they knew what movement he had made. Every time (though they had no idea of what he was trying to find out) they told him precisely what he had done. Then going close to one large flower he passed his hand all round it; and the blossom turned its head and faced the moving hand all the way round the circle.
There was no doubt in our minds whatever, when we had finished our experiments, that the Vanity Lilies could in their own way see—though where the machinery called eyes was placed in their anatomy we could not as yet discover.
The Doctor spent hours and days trying to solve this problem. But, he told me, he met with very little success. For a while he was forced to the conclusion (since he could not find in the flowers any eyes such as we knew) that what he had taken for a sense of vision was only some other sense, highly developed, which produced the same results as seeing.
“He passed his hand all around it”
“After all, Stubbins,” said he, “just because we ourselves only have five senses, it doesn’t follow that other creatures can’t have more. It has long been supposed that certain birds had a sixth sense. Still, the way those flowers feel light, can tell colors, movement, and form, makes it look very much as though they had found a way of seeing—even if they haven’t got eyes. . . . Humph! Yes, one might quite possibly see with other things besides eyes.”
Going through his baggage that night after our day’s work was done, the Doctor discovered among his papers an illustrated catalogue which had somehow got packed by accident. John Dolittle, always a devoted gardener, had catalogues sent to him from nearly every seed merchant and nurseryman in England.