he response in 'inorganic'
matter, has followed a prolonged study of the activities of plant-life
as compared with the corresponding functioning of animal life. But since
plants for the most part seem motionless and passive, and are indeed
limited in their range of movement, special apparatus of extreme
delicacy had to be invented, which should magnify the tremor of
excitation and also measure the perception period of a plant to a
thousandth part of a second. Ultra-microscopic movements were measured
and recorded; the length measured being often smaller 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 long-standing error which
divided the vegetable world into sensitive and insensitive. The
remarkable performance of the Praying Palm Tree of Faridpore, 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 tree is to be ascribed to wrong theory and
defective observation. My investigations 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 this method of
investigation will advance practical agriculture; since for the first
time we are able to analyse and study sepa