13 MAN A VEGETABLE?

Hawera Star, Volume LI, 3 January 1931, Page 9

13 MAN A VEGETABLE?

rpilß ordinary man will be conscious of no new huinilation on learning from Professor Bower, president of the British Association, that he is a distant cousin of the vegetable. He has grown accustomed since Darwin \s day_ to the notion that some of the relations in his family tree are nothing to boast of, and besides lie has recently got such a poor opinion of himself from the psycho-analysts and realistic novelists that he would be scarcely surprised if a reputable baboon or an. Bclzcll Blue potato regarded kinship with him, not as an honour, but as a disgrace, writes Robert Lind in the “News Chronicle. ’ ’ It did not, in any case, need the men of science with their speculations to suggest to the ordinary human being that there was a marked family resemblance between him and many things in the animal and vegetable kingdoms. It was not, lam sure, a man of science wlio first, named one kind of woman a cat, another a duck, and another a butterfly. The goose in human form was recognised long before the British Association began to theorise. And the common vocabularv suggests that a human being may be " a not too distant relation of the donkey, the pig, the monkey, the rat, and even the worm. It. may be said, indeed, that if you look at any human being closely, you will see in him an astonishing resemblance, not in conduct, perhaps, but in appearance to one of the other animals. One man is like a sheep, another like a lion, another tike a lizard. You will see men who look like fish provided with arms and logs. You will see others who, as you watch them, will make you think of the wolf, the hippopotamus, the frog, or the spider. The resemblances between human beings and the other animals are naturally closer than those between human beings and the fruits, flowers and vegetables. Y~et how often, when praising or dis-praising our fellow-

Professor’s Novel 1 heory

mortals, we go so by identifying them with or comparing them to flowers or vegetables. Sir Harry Lauder sings of “Mary my Scotch Bluebell,” though the resemblance between a human being and a bluebell is by no means easy to detect to the common eye. Poets have also named women roses, lilies, and daisies; and Frenchmen regard it as a flattering endearment to describe them as cabbages. Others have seen in them resemblances to silver birches, and the Greek aim Latin records actually contain instances of women who were metamorphosed into trees and buehes.

And there aro scores of other ways in which the vocabulary of mankind has drawn emphatic, attention to the vegetable element in our nature and appearance. You will find in the works of Mr. P. iG. Wodehouse and other modern writers that the human head, for instance, is being constantly referred to as a fruit or a vegetable. At one moment, it is the onion; at another the old lemon; at another the old melon. It has, unless lam mistaken, been described as a coco-nut. The popular nouns, cabbagediead . and turnip-face, are epiphets that similarly convev the opinion that all life, human, and vegetable is one. It is in the same mood of vegetarian keenness that our races discoverer, that it ‘/as possioie at times to trace a resemblance to the human hair in the carrot and to the human ear in the cauliflower. The violet has been seen in the human eye, the rose in the cheek, and the lily in the hand. And now science comes along suggesting to us that the human being. Tike most other animals, is merely a plant that moves about, and that a plant is merely' an animal that stays in the same place. It is. what I always suspected, and now my' suspicion is confirmed by' Professor Bower. Probably, however, I have misunderstood him.