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The ability to speak and exchange ideas with others stimulates thought and speculation. For a long while, human notions about ourselves and nature were crude and confused. With the development of agriculture and a settled instead of a nomadic life, a small minority enjoyed leisure to put their minds in order and think more deeply. They began to grope toward wider horizons and, with growing wisdom, their sympathies expanded. The Stoics taught that all good people everywhere are friends; Christians proclaimed the brotherhood of mankind; oriental religions inculcated respect

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for all creatures. Whatever their religion or philosophyor lack of eithergenerous, sensitive spirits reach out with love and grateful appreciation toward an inclusive whole. That an animal insulated in a flexible skin to safeguard the delicately balanced physiological processes supporting each individual's life should expand spiritually and intellectually so far beyond the enclosing integument is the most unpredictable development, the greatest paradox, in the whole paradoxical realm of life. But perhaps, if our insight were deeper, we might recognize that the expansive human spirit is a flowering of tendencies present in the materials of which we all are made, a partial fulfillment of the universal movement to give value to Being by ordering its contents in patterns of increasing amplitude, complexity, and coherence.

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6

Paradoxical Plants

Plants are independent, self-supporting organisms; animals are dependent upon them; from this fundamental difference most other far-reaching differences between plants and animals may be traced. A typical vascular plant is rooted in the ground, from which it draws the water and salts that it needs to maintain its independent life. Anchored in one spot, it is unable to change its location and, accordingly, it lacks both locomotor organs and sensory organs to guide them. Without such organs, a brain and central nervous system to receive information through the senses and direct the organism's course would be superfluous. Its movements are limited to alterations in the arrangement of its parts, especially foliage, by growth or changes in the turgor of its tissues, which may be slow or swift. A typical flowering plant stands erect with its roots in the soil, spreading its leaves in the sunlight. Less often it creeps over the ground, preserving its independence if not its upright posture.

A minority of plants compromise their independence for certain economies or other advantages. Most numerous in this category, as noted, are the vines that save the expense of forming self-supporting stems and rise more swiftly into the sunshine by twining around or clinging to other plants. As we have likewise seen, some plants become half-parasites, drawing sap from their hosts but retaining their green leaves and capacity for photosynthesis, like mistletoes. A few flowering plants lose their chlorophyll and become

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full parasites. Most surprising of all are the insectivorous or, more correctly, carnivorous plants, which in traps of great diversity catch and digest a great variety of small insects and other creatures, including an occasional vertebrate such as a tiny tadpole or hatchling fish, thereby obtaining nitrogenous compounds, phosphates, and other salts rare or lacking in the swamps, sphagnum bogs, or poor soil where many of them grow. Worldwide, about 450 species of dicotyledonous flowering plants, belonging to fifteen genera in six families, have adopted the carnivorous habit. Since all these plants retain their chlorophyll and capacity to synthesize carbohydrates, none is as completely dependent upon other organisms for food as animals are; but by feeding like animals many of them increase their growth

Pitcher Plants or Pitfall Traps

The traps are all modified leaves, or parts of leaves. They may be passive, waiting motionless for victims to enter them, or active, moving