STUDIES IN ELECTRO-PHYSIOLOGY 



CHAPTER I 

 GENERAL 



IT has long been known that the application of electricity 

 to the soil is sometimes beneficial to plant life, and some 

 remarkable results in the direction of increasing the 

 quantity and quality of crops have been in that way 

 obtained. But hitherto no adequate attempt seems to 

 have been made to ascertain if Nature has endowed the 

 vegetable world with any system by means of which 

 currents of electricity can be utilised, assimilated, or 

 stored. 



The experiments, therefore, conducted during the past 

 thirty or more years have not been altogether conclusive, 

 and no really satisfactory evidence has yet been obtained 

 beyond the fact that, under certain conditions and in 

 certain circumstances, electricity is favourable to growth. 



In Structural and Physiological Botany by Thome, 

 translated by Dr. Alfred W. Bennett, and accepted as the 

 recognised text-book in the technical schools of Germany, 

 there occurs the following passage : 



" The chemical processes within the cells of a plant, 

 the molecular movements connected with growth, and the 

 internal changes on which the activity of the protoplasm 

 depends whether exhibited in the formation of new cells 



3 B2 



