Plants are great inventors, and by continual experimentation have perfected thousands of ingenious devices to help them in their life struggles. Many of these have to do with the all-important processes of reproduction and cross-fertilization. The elaborate organs which oftentimes force visiting insects to aid the flowers in their love-making are conclusive proofs of directing intelligence. If, as is generally believed, vegetable life preceded animal life on this planet, then the plants must have developed these special reproductive organs in which insects act as the fertilizing agents as direct attempts to benefit the race by cross-breeding. While cross-fertilization is vitally necessary for the maintenance of a vigorous and hardy stock, inbreeding either between flowers of the same plant or even between the organs of a single bi-sexual flower is often practiced. In the love-making of the Grass of Parnassus and the Love in the Mist (_Nigella_), we have a very pretty and intelligent act. The flowers are unisexual and, as the females usually grow on much longer stalks than the males, the latter would not have much chance of showering their pollen on their consorts, if it were not for the fact that, at the proper season, without outside stimulation, the “tall females bend down to their dwarf husbands.” This surely is as intelligent and conscious as the mating of animals. The carnivorous plants act with uncanny wisdom. The insect-devouring Sundews pay no attention to pebbles, bits of metal, or other foreign substances placed on their leaves, but are quick enough to sense the nourishment to be derived from a piece of meat. Laboratory specimens have been observed to actually reach out toward Flies pinned on cards near them. So highstrung are these sensitive organisms that they can be partially paralyzed if certain spots on their leaves are pricked. Many people have no hesitancy in ascribing considerable intelligence to the higher animals; why do they balk at making the same concession to plants? If you concede intelligence to a single animal, you concede _some measure_ of brain-power to all animals down to the one-celled Amoeba, and so must grant the same favour to the plant world. Plants and animals, besides having many habits in common, in their simplest forms are often indistinguishable. Both reduce themselves to single-celled masses of protoplasm. The Myxomycetes are both so plant-like and at the same time so animal-like that their classification “depends rather on the general philosophical position of the observer than on facts.” Possibly they are both animal and plant at the same time--a sort of “missing link” connecting the two kingdoms of life.