ts colour from? From the earth, air, &c.? Yes--but how? Those petals
of such ineffable texture--that hue that outvies the cheek of a
child--that scent again? Look at earth, air, and water--these are all
the raw material that the rose has got to work with; does it show any
sign of want of intelligence in the alchemy with which it turns mud into
rose-leaves? What chemist can do anything comparable? Why does no one
try? Simply because every one knows that no human intelligence is equal
to the task. We give it up. It is the rose's department; let the rose
attend to it--and be dubbed unintelligent because it baffles us by the
miracles it works, and the unconcerned business-like way in which it
works them.

"See what pains, again, plants take to protect themselves against their
enemies. They scratch, cut, sting, make bad smells, secrete the most
dreadful poisons (which Heaven only knows how they contrive to make),
cover their precious seeds with spines like those of a hedgehog, frighten
insects with delicate nervous systems by assuming portentous shapes, hide
themselves, grow in inaccessible places, and tell lies so plausibly as to
deceive even their subtlest foes.

"They lay traps smeared with bird-lime, to catch insects, and persuade
them to drown themselves in pitchers which they have made of their
leaves, and fill with water; others make themselves, as it were, into
living rat-traps, which close with a spring on any insect that settles
upon them; others make their flowers into the shape of a certain fly that
is a great pillager of honey, so that when the real fly comes it thinks
that the flowers are bespoke, and goes on elsewhere. Some are so clever
as even to overreach themselves, like the horse-radish, which gets pulled
up and eaten for the sake of that pungency with which it protects itself
against underground enemies. If, on the other hand, they think that any
insect can be of service to them, see how pretty they make themselves.

"What is to be intelligent if to know how to do what one wants to do, and
to do it repeatedly, is not to be intelligent? Some say that the rose-
seed does not want to grow into a rose-bush. Why, then, in the name of
all that is reasonable, does it grow? Likely enough it is unaware of the
want that is spurring it on to action. We have no reason to suppose that
a human embryo knows that it wants to grow into a baby, or a baby into a
man. Nothing ever shows signs of knowing wh