Melchizedek Hobbs had taken up a watering can and an artist's palette with little cups of chemicals instead of paint. He went down the aisle, moistening the soil around one plant, stroking another's trembling leaves, feeding a third with lime or potash or some other stuff from the palette. Gradually their leaves unfolded and I saw the little new plants budding from their mothers' stems, just above the highest whorl of leaves. The shape the things took seemed to depend on the kind of soil they were in, but the young plants were all alike, tiny and green and shapeless, much like the embryo of any animal. Professor Hobbs came back and set down his watering can and palette. His pale eyes were pleading with me to understand. He looked like some medieval sorcerer in his long black robe with its scores of little pockets stuffed with growing plants. "They are very like animals," he repeated morosely. "The female of the species is quite essential to the normal upbringing of the young. It is not so much a question of nourishment, especially after the young plants have fallen off and taken root, but there is a strong--_rapport_, your French friends would say--between the parent plant and her offspring. Affection, almost. I am convinced that she teaches them the things that they must know to live in the environment in which they find themselves." His eyes were beginning to gleam. "It is very interesting! Very! I have placed young plants in entirely different soil, fed them entirely different salts, yet so long as they are near their mother they will endeavor to take her form. I have brought stranger-young to a bearing female and placed them among her brood, and they become like her. These--", he touched the tiny plants in his pockets tenderly--"these are orphans which no other plant would adopt. I have had to do so myself." My head went around like a teetotum. The whole thing was a nightmare! Certainly I had never suspected what would follow my innocent gift of the beautiful flowers which had attracted me so in Madagascar. No wonder the town thought him mad! * * * * * We went back through the long greenhouse, and again I saw stems and blossoms twist and sway to greet him. He touched one gorgeous purple bloom and it stiffened under his hand like a cat, but with the slow, painful motion of something which has no right to move. [Illustration: _He touched one gorgeous blossom and it stiffened under his hand like a cat!_]