68 MASSACHUSETTS HORTICULTURAL SOCIETY. 



•A. Physiological Effect of Anesthetics upon Plants in 

 Active Growth. 



The earliest mention we have been able to find regarding etheri- 

 zation of plants is that contained in an article by Drude, Ledien, 

 and Naumann (6) published in 1902, in which the authors claim 

 that Leclerc more than fifty years ago observed the action of ether 

 upon plants. Unfortunately they neglected to cite their authority 

 for this statement and we are therefore left in doubt as to the exact 

 nature of Leclerc's investigations, and are unable to determine 

 whether he was the first to discover that plant response to anesthet- 

 ics was physiologically similar to that in animals. It seems 

 rather singular that such writers upon the svibject of etherization as 

 Johannsen (15) and INIaumene (20) should not have knoAvn of these 

 earlier investigations, certain it is that no mention is made of Leclerc's 

 work in any of their publications. These writers and those who 

 have followed them with, so far as we are aware, but one excep- 

 tion (12) have given the credit for this discovery to Claude Bernard 

 (4). Bernard's observations were made in 1878 and are of such an 

 interesting nature that we desire to present a rough translation of 

 certain portions of his paper. He says "The agents which we 

 employ to render man or animal insensible are ether and chloroform. 

 Well! singularly enough plants like animals can be anesthetized 

 and all the attendant phenomena may be observed in essentially 

 the same manner. I have separately placed under different bell- 

 glasses, a bird, mouse, frog, and a sensitive plant. , Under each 

 bellglass I placed a sponge saturated with ether. The anesthetic 

 influence was not slow to make itself felt — the climax was soon 

 reached. It was the bird, highest in organization, which was the 

 first to succumb and so on. The sensitive plant was the last to 

 come to rest or to become insensible to external stimuli. It was not 

 until after the lapse of twenty or tAventy-five minutes that the sensi- 

 tive plant commenced to show signs of insensibility. In half an 

 hour it was completely anesthetized. 



"The effect of the anesthetic is therefore the same in animals 

 as in plants. That which we here observe in the sensitive plant is 

 in effect true for all other movements that have been noted in plants, 



