f their life-tremulousness and their death spasm, in
script that is as inarticulate as they. May it not be said that this
their story has a pathos of its own, beyond any that the poets have
conceived?

PROF. J. C. BOSE AT MAYAVATI

MARVELS OF PLANT LIFE

On the 8th June 1912, Dr J. C. Bose, who had gone to Advaita Ashrama,
Mayavati, on a holiday trip, gave an illuminating discourse on the
marvels of plant life.

He began by stating that a stimulus takes a certain time before it gets
a response. This stimulus may be of different forms, _e.g._, it may be a
sound stimulus, a light stimulus, an electric stimulus, and so on. The
feebler the stimulus, the greater is the time it takes to elicit the
response. For instance if one is called by a distant voice, one doubts
whether he has been called at all, but in the case of a piercing scream,
he starts up at once.

Now, the difficulty is that when the stimulus, the blow, is so strong as
to get an instantaneous response, how is one to measure this
infinitesimal time between the blow and the response? And this must be
done absolutely free from any personal interference, so as to ensure
correct results.

Dr. Bose here described how after deep thought and careful experiments
and researches of several years he invented and manufactured a highly
sensitive instrument which could automatically record the "response
time" of a plant even to one thousandth part of a second. And in order
to convey a graphic idea of the principles under which it worked, he had
even made by means of a few simple things a crude form of his
instrument, which helped the audience to form a clear idea of how a
shock given to a plant which was experimented upon, would be recorded
automatically by the apparatus by means of dots on its writing pad, and
also how to ascertain the exact time each plant took to respond to the
stimulus received. Thus the plant now records its own history unerringly
by its own hand as it were. And that the _same_ results are obtained
each time the experiment is repeated under similar conditions, shows
that this recording of the response time is a scientific phenomenon.

As an example of the similarities of reactions in plant and animal,
Prof. Bose described the rhythmic activities of certain plants, in which
automatic pulsations are maintained as in the animal heart. This
phenomenon is exemplified by the Telegraph plant, which grows wild in
the Gangetic plane; its Indian na