Living plants are a part and parcel of the life of our globe. They preceded in the grand scheme of creation animal existences. Low down in the scale of life are forms about which it cannot be predicated these are plants and these are animals. Scientists are unable to say where plant-life ends and animal-life begins. No hard-and-fast line can be drawn between the two vast kingdoms of life, and it is often wholly impossible to decide whether we are dealing with an animal or a plant. There can be no question that the earliest life was vegetable by nature, and that its habitat was the primeval ocean. This is no less the teaching of science than that of the Scriptures. From some such life, originating _de novo_ as the Spirit of God passed over the waters, the two great branches of animate nature may have taken their rise. What the form of this life may have been, whether cellular or a mere mass of formless protoplasm, the mind of man cannot asseverate. It is a mystery, and will doubtless ever remain as such to finite intelligence. That this life, no matter how apparently insignificant it must have been, breathed in its own simple fashion, that is, by the coetaneous operation of the _ruach chayim_ and the _neshemet chayim_ upon its simple substance in accordance with natural law, there can be no dispute. Breathing is not always conditioned by the existence of nostrils. Plants respire, or, in other words, take in carbonic acid from the air through their stomata, or mouths, which they separate into its components of carbon and oxygen, appropriating the former, which they build into solid matter, but usually throwing off the latter into the great receptacle of atmosphere from which it was extracted. Even a moner, which has no distinction of parts, may be said to breathe, but it breathes by means of its whole external surface, for _neshemeh_ and _ruach_ are as necessary to it as to man himself. It will thus be obvious that plants are living, breathing frames, or bodies of life, and hence are as much entitled to be considered as living souls as animals are. Let but God withdraw his _ruach_, or spirit, from them, and they die and to their dust return. Surely no more could be predicated of animals. CONSCIOUSNESS IN PLANTS.