TIMING AND THE FLOWERING PROCESS 149 



same for all individuals in the test and that recur at the same time 

 each day. He shows a high degree of statistical significance in his 

 results. Controlling barometric pressure failed to remove these 

 responses. He feels that the organisms are responding to some 

 environmental factor which we are not yet able to control or perhaps 

 even to recognize. Cosmic rays could provide an example. Accord- 

 ing to this concept, living organisms measure time in much the way 

 that an electric clock measures time by responding to the number of 

 alterations per second in the direction of the electric current. Thus 

 an electric clock may not itself measure time, but the actual time- 

 measuring system is located in the power plant which supplies the 

 electricity. The electric clock only reflects this. Of course, its gear 

 train may be changed so that it runs either fast or slow, and organisms 

 might respond the same way accounting for different periods in the 

 same environment. We shall consider three types of experiments 

 which tend to refute this viewpoint of exogenous timing. 



A. Biological time measurement has been shown to continue 

 even when certain organisms are taken into deep salt mines in 

 Germany, where cosmic-ray fluctuations have been essentially 

 eliminated. Of course, there may be some factor other than cosmic 

 rays which was not eliminated. 



B. Honey bees have been trained to a time schedule in Europe 

 and then flown by transatlantic jet to New York. If they were 

 responding to some fluctuation in the environment related to the 

 rotation of the earth, then their time measurement should have 

 been upset by this procedure. It wasn't. They continued to 

 measure time on the European schedule even though they were 

 displaced by about 5 hr of earth time. 



C. It was reasoned that a way to test the exogenous nature of 

 timing was to remove the organism from the eff'ects of the rotating 

 earth. This could be done, of course, by placing the organism in 

 an artificial earth satellite. Such an experiment has not been done 

 at this time (fall, 1962) but Karl Hamner reasoned that if an 

 organism were placed on the north or south pole on a turntable 

 which rotated once every 24 hr in a direction opposite to the 

 rotation of the earth, the organism would essentially be removed 

 from the eff'ects of the earth's rotation. The creature on the turn- 

 table would be moving around the sun (at the earth's speed of 

 18.5 miles per sec) in a stationary position. If time measurement 



M 



