142 GERMINATION 



upon " Electrical Stimuli," in which will be found other 

 experiments with potatoes ; the side growths being sugges- 

 tive, in my judgment, of multiple cell division. 



In this series the final trial was with some seeds of the 

 Giant Rocca Onion, sown in a 5-inch pot and electrified ; 

 4 volts, positive to bottom and negative to top of soil. 



When sown in the open ground these seeds would not send 

 a shoot above soil for at least two months. Under electrifi- 

 cation they appeared in nine days, grew 4-inches in nineteen 

 days and one pulled seventy days after sowing was 7-inches 

 in height with a root like that of the Radish but without 

 any sign of bulb. The other plants were rotting. 



I am not going to suggest that in the foregoing experiments 

 there is substantial evidence that the morbid conditions 

 produced by electrification resemble in their character the 

 changes brought about in animal tissues by Cancer. To 

 the lay mind they seem to, and indeed may, be analogous ; 

 and I would point out two things, i.e., (1) under the stimulus 

 of electricity^ of wrong sign, cell division is, as I believe, forced. 

 to the disadvantage of the plant, and (2) under comparatively 

 low electro-motive forces, hard, dry lumps are apt to form 

 at the part or parts where the electrolytic dissolution of 

 iron is most active ; the fluid formerly present in that area 

 not only being driven to the kathode but the protoplasm 

 killed. It does not call for an undue stretch of the imagina- 

 tion to conceive the semi-fluid areas to be dead cells — the 

 secondary deposits as it were — and the mere fact that the 

 hard lumps are dry goes to show, even without the con- 

 firmation of the galvanometer, that they are deficient in 

 electro-vitality. 



I have only made brief mention of the work of J. Arnold 

 but it seems to lend support to the views I hold and to be, 

 in any case, worthy of close attention. I extract the follow- 

 ing from Thoma's Pathology and Pathological Anatomy : 

 " When the cell and nucleus divide into more than two 

 portions, the mitotic processes are exactly similar, as was 

 shown by J. Arnold. Skein and star, equatorial plate and 

 achromatic spindle occur in forms which can be most easily 

 understood by reference to the following figure : 



