Page:Life Movements in Plants.djvu/17

 than a fraction of a single wave-length of light. The secret of plant life was thus for the first time revealed by the autographs of the plant itself. This evidence of the plant’s own script removed the prevailing error which divided the vegetable world into sensitive and insensitive. The remarkable performance of the ‘Praying’ Palm Tree of Faridpur, which bows, as if to prostrate itself, every evening, is only one of the latest instances which show that the supposed insensibility of plants and still more of rigid trees is to be ascribed to wrong theory and defective observation. Investigations which I have carried out show that all plants, even the trees, are fully alive to changes of environment; they respond visibly to all stimuli, even to the slight fluctuations of light caused by a drifting cloud. This series of investigations has completely established the fundamental identity of life reactions in plant and animal, as seen in a similar periodic insensibility in both, corresponding to what we call sleep; as seen in the death-spasm, which takes place in the plant as in the animal. This unity in organic life is also exhibited in that spontaneous pulsation which in the animal is heart-beat; it appears in the identical effects of stimulants, anaesthetics and of poisons in vegetable and animal tissues. This physiological identity in the effect of drugs is regarded by leading physicians as of great significance in the scientific advance of medicine; since here we have a means of testing the effect of drugs under conditions far simpler than those presented by the patient, far subtler too, as well as more humane than those of experiments on animals.

Growth of plants and its variations under different treatment is instantly recorded by my Crescograph. Authorities expect that this method of investigation will advance practical agriculture; since for the first time we are able 2