Page:Life Movements in Plants.djvu/110

80 of the stimulating or the depressing action of the drug. The difficulty may be eliminated by previous long-continued application of water on the pulvinus and waiting till the attainment of uniform excitability which generally takes place in the course of about three hours. Subsequent application of a chemical solution gives rise to characteristic variation in the response.

Variation of excitability after section: Experiment 23.—In order to test the history of the change of excitability resulting from the immediate and after-effect of section, I took an intact plant and fixed the upper half of the stem in a clamp. The response of a given leaf was now taken to the stimulus of an induction shock of 0.1 unit intensity, the unit chosen being that which causes a bare perception of shock in a human being. The specimen was vigorous and the response obtained was found to be a maximum. The stem bearing the leaf was cut at the moment marked in the record with a cross, and water was applied at the cut end. The effect of section was to cause the maximum fall of the leaf, with subsequent recovery. After this, successive responses to uniform stimuli at intervals of 15 minutes show, in (1) of Fig. 31, that a depression of excitability has been induced owing to the shock caused by section. In course of an hour, however, the excitability had been restored almost to its original value before the section. This was the case with a vigorous specimen, but with less vigorous ones a longer period of about three hours is required for restoration. In certain other cases the response after section exhibits alternate fatigue; that is to say, one response is large and the next feeble, and this alternation