XIII 



PICTURESQUE EXPERIMENTS 



To those who have never made experiments on 

 plants it may seem that 'picturesque' is an odd term 

 to apply to laboratory methods. But to an experi- 

 mentalist the adjective does not seem overstrained. 

 There is not merely the pleasure of seeing a predic- 

 tion verified — that may be experienced in more 

 everyday matters. There is a peculiar delight in 

 the discovery of a method of revealing some detail 

 in the natural history of living things. I 

 remember vividly the pleasure which I felt when 

 I first tried the experiment on Sorghum, described 

 in the essay on the Movements of Plants in 

 this volume.^ I hoped that the seedlings would 

 curve in the elaborate manner shown in Fig. 4. But 

 I had so little expectation of success that I did not 

 explain the object of the trial to my laboratory 

 assistant, and it came as a shock of delight when he 

 told me that the seedlings had "curled up like 

 corkscrews." I do not think that it is an exaggera- 

 tion to say, that this result is a picturesque illustra- 

 tion of the distribution of gravitational sensitive- 

 ness in plants. The instances in the present essay 

 are not concerned with the movements of plants, 

 and are so far less interesting, but I think the 

 reader will not refuse them the same adjective. 



* See p. 50. 



