Luck, or Cunning, as the Main Means of Organic Modification

by Samuel Butler

Among the points with which it was most incumbent upon me to deal was that of vegetable intelligence. A reader may well say that unless I give plants much the same sense of pleasure and pain, memory, power of will, and intelligent perception of the best way in which to employ their opportunities that I give to low animals, my argument falls to the ground. If I declare organic modification to be mainly due to function, and hence in the closest correlation with mental change, I must give plants, as well as animals, a mind, and endow them with power to reflect and reason upon all that most concerns them. Many who will feel little difficulty about admitting that animal modification is upon the whole mainly due to the secular cunning of the animals themselves will yet hesitate before they admit that plants also can have a reason and cunning of their own.

Unwillingness to concede this is based principally upon the error concerning intelligence to which I have already referred—I mean to our regarding intelligence not so much as the power of understanding as that of being understood by ourselves. Once admit that the evidence in favour of a plant’s knowing its own business depends more on the efficiency with which that business is conducted than either on our power of understanding how it can be conducted, or on any signs on the plant’s part of a capacity for understanding things that do not concern it, and there will be no further difficulty about supposing that in its own sphere a plant is just as intelligent as an animal, and keeps a sharp look-out upon its own interests, however indifferent it may seem to be to ours. So strong has been the set of recent opinion in this direction that with botanists the foregoing now almost goes without saying, though few five years ago would have accepted it.

To no one of the several workers in this field are we more indebted for the change which has been brought about in this respect than to my late valued and lamented friend Mr. Alfred Tylor. Mr. Tylor was not the discoverer of the protoplasmic continuity that exists in plants, but he was among the very first to welcome this discovery, and his experiments at Carshalton in the years 1883 and 1884 demonstrated that, whether there was protoplasmic continuity in plants or no, they were at any rate endowed with some measure of reason, forethought, and power of self-adaptation to varying surroundings. It is not for me to give the details of these experiments. I had the good fortune to see them more than once while they were in progress, and was present when they were made the subject of a paper read by Mr. Sydney B. J. Skertchly before the Linnean Society, Mr. Tylor being then too ill to read it himself. The paper has since been edited by Mr. Skertchly, and published. [253a] Anything that should be said further about it will come best from Mr. Skertchly; it will be enough here if I give the résumé of it prepared by Mr. Tylor himself.

In this Mr. Tylor said:—“The principles which underlie this paper are the individuality of plants, the necessity for some co-ordinating system to enable the parts to act in concert, and the probability that this also necessitates the admission that plants have a dim sort of intelligence.

“It is shown that a tree, for example, is something more than an aggregation of tissues, but is a complex being performing acts as a whole, and not merely responsive to the direct influence of light, &c. The tree knows more than its branches, as the species know more than the individual, the community than the unit.

“Moreover, inasmuch as my experiments show that many plants and trees possess the power of adapting themselves to unfamiliar circumstances, such as, for instance, avoiding obstacles by bending aside before touching, or by altering the leaf arrangement, it seems probable that at least as much voluntary power must be accorded to such plants as to certain lowly organised animals.

“Finally, a connecting system by means of which combined movements take place is found in the threads of protoplasm which unite the various cells, and which I have now shown to exist even in the wood of trees.

“One of the important facts seems to be the universality of the upward curvature of the tips of growing branches of trees, and the power possessed by the tree to straighten its branches afterwards, so that new growth shall by similar means be able to obtain the necessary light and air.

“A house, to use a sanitary analogy, is functionally useless without it obtains a good supply of light and air. The architect strives so to produce the house as to attain this end, and still leave the house comfortable. But the house, though dependent upon, is not produced by, the light and air. So a tree is functionally useless, and cannot even exist without a proper supply of light and air; but, whereas it has been the custom to ascribe the heliotropic and other motions to the direct influence of those agents, I would rather suggest that the movements are to some extent due to the desire of the plant to acquire its necessaries of life.”

The more I have reflected upon Mr. Tylor’s Carshalton experiments, the more convinced I am of their great value. No one, indeed, ought to have doubted that plants were intelligent, but we all of us do much that we ought not to do, and Mr. Tylor supplied a demonstration which may be henceforth authoritatively appealed to.