We give it up. It is the rose's department; let the rose
attend to it--and be dubbed unintelligent because it baffles us by the
miracles it works, and the unconcerned business-like way in which it
works them.
"See what pains, again, plants take to protect themselves against their
enemies. They scratch, cut, sting, make bad smells, secrete the most
dreadful poisons (which Heaven only knows how they contrive to make),
cover their precious seeds with spines like those of a hedgehog, frighten
insects with delicate nervous systems by assuming portentous shapes, hide
themselves, grow in inaccessible places, and tell lies so plausibly as to
deceive even their subtlest foes.
"They lay traps smeared with bird-lime, to catch insects, and persuade
them to drown themselves in pitchers which they have made of their
leaves, and fill with water; others make themselves, as it were, into
living rat-traps, which close with a spring on any insect that settles
upon them; others make their flowers into the shape of a certain fly that
is a great pillager of honey, so that when the real fly comes it thinks
that the flowers are bespoke, and goes on elsewhere. Some are so clever
as even to overreach themselves, like the horse-radish, which gets pulled
up and eaten for the sake of that pungency with which it protects itself
against underground enemies.
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