LITERARY NOTICES. 



Bose, Jagadis Chunder. Plant Response as a Means of Physiological Investigation. London, 

 Longmans, Green and Company, xxxviii + 781 pp. and 287 text figures. iqo6. 



In an important sense this volume is a continuation of the work which the author 

 presented in 1902 in a book entitled "Response in the Living and the Non-living."^ 

 As the title of the book which we are now to examine suggests, the writer is interested 

 primarily in physiological research, and the plant serves him merely as a means 

 of approaching certain problems of general physiology which he wishes to investi- 

 gate. "Plant Response" deals with a large range of facts the greater part of which 

 its author presents as the results of his own researches. It is a book for the general 

 physiologist rather than for the botanist, the zoologist, the plant or animal physiolo- 

 gist, or the student of behavior. But all of these specialists will find an abundance 

 of interesting material in most of its chapters. 



The volume consists of nine parts, which bear the following headings: Part I, 

 Simple Response; Part II, Modification of Response under Various Conditions; 

 Part III, Excitability and Conductivity; Part IV, Multiple and Autonomous 

 Response; Part V, Ascent of Sap; Part VI, Growth; Part VII, Geotropism, Chemo- 

 tropism, and Galvanotropism; Part VIII, Heliotropism; Part IX, General Survey 

 and Conclusion. Each of the fifty-two chapters, except the last three, which are 

 resumes of the contents of the preceding forty-nine chapters, ends with a brief 

 summary. The reader is thus enabled to get the gist of the author's results, if he 

 so desires, without reading all of the eight hundred pages of the book. 



Bose believes in the continuity of response from the inorganic to the organic 

 and he further believes that the responses of plants do not differ in any fundamental 

 way from those of animals. In fact, his book, "Plant Response" is devoted pri- 

 marily to a defense of the thesis that plant response and animal response are essen- 

 tially the same. 



By the employment of a number of ingeniously contrived instruments, to which 

 unfortunately hybrid Sanskrit-Greek names have been applied, Bose succeeded 

 in demonstrating that plants give definite and immediate motor responses to all 

 forms of stimulation which influence animal tissues. The so-called sensitive plants 

 differ from other plants merely in degree of responsiveness. All plants react to 

 stimuli, but some react more obviously than do others. 



As an illustration of the type of method by which BosE was enabled to get 

 graphic records of the form of plant responses I shall briefly describe what he calls 

 the "Optical Pulse-recorder" (p. 7). To the end of a lever of aluminum wire, the 

 fulcrum of which rests on frictionless supports of glass, is attached a thread of 

 cotton silk which is fastened to a motile leaflet by a drop of shellac varnish. The 

 other arm of the lever carries a sliding counterpoise. The fulcrum rod carries a 

 small mirror. A movement of the leaflet causes the lever to move and there is a 



'Longmans, Green and Company. six 4- 199 pp. 1902. 



