lOI 



NEWS NOTES 



Botany had headlines on the front pages of the newspapers 

 when Sir Jagadis Chunder Bose gave a demonstration of the 

 heart beats of plants before the British Association for the 

 advancement of Science on August sixth. The delicate appara- 

 tus, apparently refinements of those previously used by Dr. 

 Bose, showed the breathing of the plants, the eflfect of poisons, 

 narcotics and stimuli. The following day many papers com- 

 mented editorily on the reports, giving the opinions of various 

 prominent botanists to the effect that the experiments were 

 interesting but the interpretations misleading. Dr. McDougal 

 stated that the vibrations of plants incident to growth are of 

 no more importance in understanding their vital activities than 

 the vibrations of a train are in showing the work of the loco- 

 motive. 



The International Conference on Flower and Fruit Sterility 

 was held in New York from August 12-14. Papers were read 

 on the effects of sterility on flower and fruit production, the 

 relation of sterility to the origin of species, its relation to self 

 and cross pollination, the causes of sterility, and on sterility 

 as manifest in a large number of cultivated plants. 



Lack of plant-quarantine laws in the past permitted entry 

 into the United States of the parasitic fungus causing the blight 

 or bark disease of chestnut, which has already laid waste the 

 chestnut north of the Potomac River and east of the Allegheny 

 Mountains. The most important stands of chestnut left in 

 this country, located in the southern Appalachian Mountains, 

 now face certain destruction by the blight, says the United 

 States Department of Agriculture in Department Circular 

 370-C, "Chestnut Blight in the Southern Appalachians." 



By 1935, it is estimated, nine-tenths of the counties of the 

 southern Appalachians will be more than 80 per cent blighted. 

 Ordinarily a large part of the chestnut in a blighted stand will 

 die within from two to five years after the 80 per cent infection 

 stage has been reached. 



The chestnut-blight organism was brought from Asia on small 

 nursery trees. The blight was first observed in New York City 



