122 LIFE AND WORK OF SIR JAGADIS C. BOSE 



In taking up his researches on the response of plants 

 Bose asked himself : 



How are we to know what unseen changes take place within 

 the plant ? If it be excited or depressed under some special 

 circumstances how are we to be made aware of it ? The only 

 conceivable way would be, if that were possible, to detect and 

 measure the actual response of the organism to a definite testing 

 blow. In an excitable condition, the feeblest stimulus should 

 evoke a large response. In a depressed state, even a strong 

 stimulus should evoke only feeble response ; and lastly when 

 death overcomes life, there would be an abrupt end of the power 

 to answer at all. In short, under successive uniform stimuli, 

 the change in the magnitude of the response should reveal to 

 us the physiological changes induced by the environment. 



We might therefore have detected the internal condition 

 of the plant if we could have made it write down its response. 

 In order to succeed in this, we have to discover some compulsive 

 force which will make the plant give an answering signal ; 

 secondly we have to supply the means for an automatic con- 

 version of these signals into an intelligent script. And last of 

 all we have ourselves to learn the nature of these hieroglyphics. 



Hence, then, is the essential transition in Bose's work 

 from physics to physiology. Now for a fuller outline of 

 the series which opened with the Response of Inorganic 

 Matter. They comprise a succession of six volumes, 

 representing many years of work, and each not only sum- 

 marising separate investigations and papers communicated 

 to the Royal or other Societies, but with large accession 

 of new material. The first of the series, * Response 

 in the Living and Non-living ' (Longmans, Green & Co., 

 1902), with 199 pages, has been already summarised above ; 

 the second, ' Plant Response ' (Longmans, 1906), amounts 

 to 781 pages, detailing 315 experiments ; the third, 

 'Comparative Electro-Physiology' (Longmans, 1907), goes 

 to 760 pages, with 321 experiments described, and as usual 

 largely figured also. The next six or seven years' work was 

 largely devoted to the perfecting of recording instruments ; 

 but substantial results of work with them are also embodied 



