Happy is he who, for the sake of Paganism, bears the burden of persecution with firm hope.

Who else have civilised the world, and built cities if not the nobles and kings of Paganism.

Who else have set in order the harbours and rivers?

And who else have taught the hidden wisdom?

To whom else has the Deity revealed itself, given oracles, and told about the future, if not to the famous men among the pagans?

The pagans have made known all of this.

They have discovered the art of healing the soul.

They have also made known the art of healing the body.

They have filled the earth with settled forms of government, and with wisdom, which is the highest good.

Without Paganism the world would be empty and miserable.

Thabit ibn Qurrah (835-901) _ student of Harran’s university.

What started off as a shelf of books in the Surgeon General’s office in 1836 has grown to a collection of millions of print and electronic resources, the U.S. National Library of Medicine has an impressive collection which it generously makes available on its website.

One article worth taking a look at is Plant Signaling and Behaviour, their results suggest that plants are intelligent organisms capable of thought and memory.   Here is the Abstract and Summary.

Secret life of plants
From memory to intelligence

Monica Gagliano does stuff with plants that no one seems to have done in a very long time, treating them in a manner that acknowledges the possibility of intelligence, consciousness and sentience.  The ‘Featured Image’ is one of her paintings.

Her main research is broadly focusing on key aspects of the ecological processes by which organisms are able to gather information on the variable conditions of their surrounding environment in order to thrive. Amongst other things she drops plants, teases them with blue lights and fans.

If she is correct this should be a major paradigm shift for us all, we may have to reckon with intelligent organisms independent of the traditional brain and nervous system model. We may be in the early stages of waking up to a world long-populated by considerably more intelligent, sentient beings than previously acknowledged, and reconsider our position with regards to Nature.

In collaboration with various disciplines across the Sciences and the Humanities, her research aims at expanding our perception of animals, plants and more generally Nature. In the process of learning how to do this, she has pioneered the brand-new research field of plant bioacoustics and extended the concept of cognition to plants, re-igniting the discourse on plant subjectivity, sentience and ethical standing.

This subject has been of interest for a while, and the questions of  Do plants posess souls or not? was considered in the linked blog post.

Monica is a Research Associate Professor in Evolutionary Ecology; Adjunct Senior Research Fellow at the University of Western Australia; Research Affiliate at the Sydney Environment Institute, University of Sydney; and Senior Research Fellow at the Biological Intelligence (BI) Lab, University of Sydney