Many people believe that peculiar mystic attachments exist between certain birds and flowers. The Persians claim that whenever a Rose is plucked, the nightingale utters a plaintive cry as if to protest against the wounding of the object of its love. Many other birds show marked affection for various plants. In the same manner, almost every man and woman has his or her favourite flower. Certain persons of a temperamental type are often emotionally affected by the presence of flowers with which they appear to have a mysterious psychic connection. Certain people claim to be able to discern such marked similiarity between human beings and various flower affinities that they undertake to liken various prominent people to different blossoms. There is much chance for scientific investigation in this field. With Perdita we at least know that “flowers of middle summer should be given to men of middle age, but for our young prince we want flowers of the spring that may become his time of day.” Sometimes, through sentimental attachment, whole peoples elect certain flowers to represent them before the world. Thus the United States has chosen the Goldenrod for its national floral emblem, while the Rose of England, the Thistle of Scotland, the Shamrock of Ireland, and the Leek of Wales act in the same capacity for the British Isles. Man paid a high compliment to the mystic veneration in which he holds the plant world when he, in his primitive beliefs, invariably conceived of heaven as some terrestrial paradise of luxurious vegetation. The Persians had their Mount Caucasus; the Arabians dreamed about an Elysium in the Desert of Arden; the Greeks and Romans had bright mental pictures of the Gardens of Hesperides; and the Celts hoped to spend their postmortem existence on an enchanted isle of wondrous beauty. Such beliefs have fallen into disuse, but man is still a long way off from a solution of the various mystic phenomena of the plant world. Botanists should leave off indexing and classifying plants for a while and endeavour to discover the subtle and fascinating laws of their psychic existence. CHAPTER XIII PLANT INTELLIGENCE “_The Marigold goes to bed with the sun, And with him rises weeping._”--_Shakespeare_ It is no new thing to believe in the existence of intelligence among plants. As far back as Aristotle, various great minds in the earth’s history have ascribed definite, thinking acts to our floral and vegetable friends. Not a few have seen unmistakable evidences of soul in plantdom. Even the most skeptical have become aware of many things they cannot explain in purely mechanistic terms. We are still living in an age which has deified human wisdom. Man has built up vast systems of knowledge and law, all based on his own deep-rooted convictions. He approaches every subject with apriori beliefs and presumptions. He is slow to acknowledge thinking powers to his companion creatures of a terrestrial universe.