74 TEQUESTA


 speak of plants and animals as if they studied, as though they
 invented things which benefit themselves and their race. Why
 not? They are constantly engaged in doing such things, in
 making short cuts, in achieving results, in lifting themselves
 out of a low and degraded position into a higher and better one,
 and this looks to meexactly like the work of intelligence, brains
 if I may say so. Had a man invented the sprout system, he would
 have been a second Morse or Fulton51

 In a later chapter, Simpson describes the staying power of the
saw palmetto: "Nothing could successfully oppose it; it is full of
initiative; it is ambitious, smart!" In Florida Wild Life: "I may be told
that all these things are so because they could not be otherwise, that
the trees are simply obeying the fixed laws of nature; yet somehow
I like to believe that in all this there is a purpose, soul, intelligence,
almost thought, that these things reach results in somewhat the same
fashion I do."53
 Most of all in Simpson's writings
 there speaks a brilliant scientist who was
 at the same time humble, warm and
 friendly, spontaneous, good-humored, ex-
 pressing an almost childlike enthusiasm
 about his green kingdom. After one wil-
 derness exploration with a fellow scien-
 tist, he reports, "I fairly shouted in my
 exuberance as one new thing after an-
 other turned up until the Doctor claimed
 he was really worried about me and
 thought I needed medical treatment."54
 On a later trip, upon finding a much-
 .' ~ sought-after tree snail: "I capered about
 -' like a happy boy; I rubbed it against my
 cheek and lovingly patted it; I talked fool-
 ishly to it. No miser ever gloated over
 his gold as I did over that magnificent
 snail."55 On Lignumvitae Key, in refer-
 CharlesT. Simpson, in his ence to his inability to throw chunks of
 most comfortable state. wood or rock up onto a high tree branch
 (Courtesy ofJohn Clark to dislodge a snail, Simpson calculated
 Eckhoft) that, "I might hit the side of a good sized