30 Master Minds of Modern Science 



tales than records of scientific fact. Listen to what he 

 says himself: 



Hitherto we have regarded trees and plants as not akin to 

 us because they are the voiceless of the world, but I will show 

 you that they are sensible creatures in that they really exist 

 and can answer your questions. When it receives a shock the 

 leaf of this mimosa drops, and we have invented an apparatus 

 by means of which this answer can be converted into intelligible 

 script. We began by attaching the dropping leaf to a lever, 

 seeking to get the response actually written on paper, but the 

 resistance of movement over paper was too great, so the lever 

 was set to vibrate at one thousand times a second and a musical 

 note was sounded. Now we could measure the effect on the 

 lever to a thousandth part of a heart-beat. 



Our hearing ranges through no fewer than eleven octaves, but 

 our sight through only one octave of light. Anything that does 

 not range between red and violet we cannot see. Yet the plant 

 actually sees the ultra-violet and even those ether waves which 

 bring to us wireless concerts. 



It is not unlikely that plants have a sixth sense. In certain 

 of my experiments I have noticed — I say it with caution, because 

 I do not want to appear to magnify the truth ; that truth exists 

 and we intend to find it — that while a plant was recording a 

 throbbing the pulsing was affected by the approach of certain 

 people, but became normal again when they went away. 

 Generally a plant took twelve minutes to recover from the 

 blow. 



The instruments invented by Sir Jagadis for the purpose 

 of measuring the pulses of plants are amazingly delicate. 

 The movements of a plant are so slow that even the slug- 

 gish progress of a snail is six thousand times faster than 

 the growth of a plant, whose average rate is one-millionth 

 part of an inch per second. One inch in a million seconds 

 — that is the average growth, but some plants, such as the 

 bamboo, grow much more rapidly. A bamboo shoot 

 grows from nine to twelve inches in twenty-four hours. 



Sir Jagadis first tried to solve the problem by means of 



