pain are twins, and the one is not attainable
without liability to the other.  The
idea is not new to poetry, though not
accepted by science.  It blooms and sparkles
in the graceful mythology of Greece, and
the somewhat less graceful mythology of
Rome; as all who remember the Dryads
and Hamadyrads; the loves of Apollo for
Laura, Daphne, and Acantha; or who at
school or college have pored over the
metaphors of Ovid; will readily admit.  The
Oriental poets of India and Persia delighted
to animate the flowers and trees, and,
according to Hafiz, the rose appreciates the
tender melodies of her lover the nightingale.
Greek superstition endowed the atropa
mandragora with all the sensations of an animal,
and believed that it shrieked with pain when
its roots were wrested from the ground.

Science may laugh at all such notions,
but Science, though a very great and learned
lady, does not yet know everything.  Her
elder sister, Poetry, often sees further and
deeper into things than she does.  Did not
Shakespeare, in the Tempest, foreshadow the
possibility of the electric telegraph more
than two hundred years before Wheatstone?
Did not Dr. Erasmus Darwin, long in advance
of James Watt and Robert Stephenson,
predict the steamship and the locomotive
engine?  Did not Coleridge, in the
Ancient Mariner, explain the modus
operandi of the then unsuspected atmospheric
railway?

On the question of the intelligence of
plants, my convictions as well as my
sympathies go with the poets rather than with
the scientific men.  I know that the trees
and the flowers, inasmuch as they live,
are my fellow-creatures, and are the
children of the same God as myself. Like
myself, they may be endowed with the
faculty, though possibly in a much fainter
degree than mine, of enjoying the world
in which His love and goodness have
placed both them and me. They breathe,
they perspire, they sleep, they feed
themselves, and may be over-fed; they are male
and female.  If science admits all these
facts, how can it logically stop short at such
a definition as that of Linnaeus, and deny
them sensation?  Darwin, in his philosophical
poem, the Botanic Garden (not
much read in the present day), fancifully
describes the loves of the flowers, and
imagines, not perhaps wrongly, that love-
making may be as agreeable to them as it
is to higher organisations:

  What beaux and beauties crowd the gaudy groves,
  And woo and win their vegetable loves!
  Here snowdrops cold and blue-eyed harebells blend
  Their tender tears as o'er the stream they bend;
  The love-sick violet and the primrose pale
  Bow their sweet heads, and whisper to the gale;
  With secret sighs, the virgin lily droops,
  And jealous cowslips hang their tawny cups;
  And the young rose, in beauty's damask pride,
  Drinks the warm blushes of his bashful bride;
  With honey lips, enamoured woodbines meet,
  Clasp with fond arms, and mix their kisses sweet.

This may be thought an idle dream,
unworthy of serious, or, more especially, of
scientific, consideration; while some very
matter-of-fact person may ask, how there
can be sensation without senses.  It is true
that flowers have no organs of sight, or
hearing, or taste, or smell, which man can
discover; but they may, nevertheless,
possess a very delicate sense of touch.  And
how much intelligence may display itself,
without any other sense than this, is
known to every one who has read the
remarkable story of Laura Bridgeman.
When she was four years old, this unhappy
person, after a long illness, was discovered
to have lost her eyes, her ears, her palate;
every door of the inner spirit leading to the
outer world of life and humanity, save the
one door of touch. But through that door,
by the patient sagacity and untiring
kindliness of Dr. Howe, of Boston,
Massachusetts, the resident physician of the
Blind Asylum to which she was consigned
as a patient of whom there was no hope,
she was enabled to communicate her wants,
her wishes, her hopes, and her ideas, to her
fellow-creatures, and to share in the
knowledge and civilisation of her time. Though
she can neither see nor hear, nor articulate,
she can talk with her hand, and she can
receive responses through the same
medium, and she can write.  Though the
great world of sound and the joyous world
of music are as alien to her as invisible
planets on the uttermost verge of sidereal
space, yet, by means of the one sense
mercifully left her she is able to distinguish her
friends and acquaintances the one from the
other, and to enjoy music, by means of the
vibration through her sensitive and
delicate nerves, of the rhythmic pulsations of
the air caused by the great organ in the
hall of the asylum.  These throb through
her whole body, giving her a palpable
pleasure, possibly as great to her as that
which more fortunate persons can derive
from the sense of hearing. "Little chinks
let in much light," says the ancient proverb;
and through the one little chink of
feeling, touch, or sensation, the intelligence
of Laura Bridgeman can both act and be
acted upon. And if it be granted that the