Faith? Hope? What sustains the perennials through long, bleak winters and makes them sure of the promise of spring? When the Alpine flowers are so positive that spring has really come that they push their inquiring heads up through the snow which still covers the mountains, they are showing a superhuman faith, literally risking death in order that they may get a strong and early start in life. Charity? When trees like the Oak and the Maple allow a whole multitude of lesser plants to dwell in the snugness of their shadows, they are showing forth some of the kindly qualities of plantdom. If they chose to they could discourage lowly neighbours after the manner of the monopolistic Beech or the aristocratic Pine. Name a human sin or virtue, good quality or bad, and one does not have to search far in the plant world for its counterpart. Along with kindness, mercy, gratitude, submissiveness, and parental love we also find cruelty, hard-heartedness, ingratitude, arrogance and neglect of offspring. Even at that, the credit side always exceeds the debit and no plant is guilty of self-destruction. It must be borne in mind, that what we call sin and malignity are to them legitimate courses of action. If plants have every property of the human soul, why have men been so slow to admit their kinship with the trees and the flowers? Life, law and love are divine and bind man to all creation. He is spiritually as well as physically related to the plants. In the past, he has endeavoured to set himself apart from Nature and look down upon her as upon another world. Because he has a brain, he has imagined that anything which has none cannot possibly possess an intelligence and an inner life. To uphold this theory he has shut his eyes to a thousand denying facts. All plants and animals of whatever kind begin life on exactly the same level. The wayside Daisy and the Human Being both start their earthly careers as single cells. In both cases, there is no visible machinery of life and consciousness, yet we can say “Here is a potential Daisy. Here is a potential Man.” The wonderful, all-pervading spirit of life belongs to both. The language of the Bible classifies man with all life under the Hebrew term _Nephesh chayiah_, that is, living soul or creature. The Old Testament favours a rigorous protection of animals and plants against wanton destruction. Is not the equality of the three kingdoms of life hinted at in the following passage from Jonah? “Thou hast had pity on the Gourd, for the which thou hast not laboured, neither madest it grow; which came up in a night, and perished in a night.” “And I shall not spare Nineveh, that great city, wherein are more than six score thousand persons that cannot discern between their right hand and their left hand and also much cattle.”