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--- secret_life_of_plants [2011-04-09 21:20] – cocky
+++ secret_life_of_plants [2011-04-10 17:50] – [Introduction] cocky
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 ====== The Secret Life of Plants ======
 **The Secret Life of Plants: by Peter Tompkins and Christopher Bird, 1973**
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 ==== Introduction ====
- <html><a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/foam/5603591016/" title="Picture 5 by _foam, on Flickr"><img src="http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5150/5603591016_dd7d797391_s.jpg" width="75" height="75" alt="Picture 5"></a></html>---At the beginning of the twentieth century Viennese biologist
+ <html><a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/foam/5603591016/" title="Picture 5 by _foam, on Flickr"><img src="http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5150/5603591016_dd7d797391_s.jpg" width="50" height="50" alt="Picture 5"></a></html>---At the beginning of the twentieth century Viennese biologist
 Raoul Francé put forth the idea, shocking to contemporary natural philosophers, that plants move their bodies as freely, easily, and gracefully as the most skilled animal or human, and
 that the only reason we don't appreciate the fact is that plants do so at
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 not moved, either toward the plant or toward the recording machine.
 **Could the plant have been reading his mind**?
+//
+related libarinth topics://
+  * [[plant perception]]
+  * [[groworld HPI ii]]
 -------------------------------
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 that in the next quarter century such photoelements could be manufac·
 tured on an industrial scale and would be a hundred times cheaper than
 silicone solar batteries now being experimented with.  Pg 76
+//
+related topic//  [[luminous:phoef]]
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-<html><a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/foam/5603665558/" title="Picture 19 by _foam, on Flickr"><img src="http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5107/5603665558_842f68afa0.jpg" width="73" height="49" alt="Picture 19"></a></html>
+<html><a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/foam/5603665558/" title="Picture 19 by _foam, on Flickr"><img src="http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5107/5603665558_842f68afa0.jpg" width="73" height="49" alt="Picture 19"></a></html>---the Bengali Sir Jagadis Chandra Bose  in 1899 betook himself to his greengrocer and purchased a bag
+of carrots and turnips, which, of all vegetables, appeared to him the most
+stolidly nonsentient, and found them to be highly sensitive. When he
+chloroformed plants, Bose discovered that they were as successfully
+anesthetized as animals, and that when the narcotic vapor was blown
+away by fresh air like animals they revived. **Using chloroform to tranquilize a huge pine tree,** Bose was able to uproot it and transplant it without
+the usually fatal shock of such operations. Pg 87
+---Since Bose knew that in plants there was respiration without gills or lungs,
+digestion without a stomach, and movements without muscles, it
+seemed plausible to him that there could be the same kind of excitation
+as in higher animals but without a complicated nervous system.
+Bose concluded that the only way to find out about the unseen
+changes which take place in plants and **tell if they were excited or
+depressed** would be to measure visually their responses to what he
+called "definite testing blows" or shocks. "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 conversion of these signals into an intelligent
+script. And, last of all, we have ourselves to learn the nature of these
+hieroglyphics."   Pg 92
+---Bose was able to show how the skins
+of lizards, tortoises, and frogs as well as those of grapes, tomatoes behaved similarly. He found that the vegetal
+digestive organs in insectivorous plants, from the tentacle of a sundew
+to the hair-lined flap of a pitcher plant, were analogous to animal stom-
+achs. He discovered close parallels between the response to light in
+leaves and in the retinas of animal eyes. With his magnifier he proved
+that plants become as fatigued by continuous stimulation as animal
+muscles, whether they were **hypersensitive mimosas or undemonstrative
+radishes**.
+---Working with the **Desmodium gyrans, a species whose continuously
+oscillating leaves recall the motion of semaphore flags** and led to its
+common appellation, telegraph plant, Bose found that the poison which
+could stop its automatic ceaseless pulsation would also stop an animal
+heart and that the antidote for this poison could bring both organisms
+back to life. Pg 92
+In Desmodium gyrans, or the telegraph plant, Bose found that if the
+cut end of a detached leaflet was dipped in water in a bent glass tube
+it r**ecovered from the shock of its amputation and began to pulsate anew**.
+Was this not like an excised animal heart which can be kept beating in
+Ringer's solution? Just as the heart stops beating when blood pressure
+is lowered and starts again when pressure is raised, Bose found the same
+was true for the pulsation of the Desmodium when the sap pressure was
+increased or decreased.
+--- One day Bose found
+that when all motion stopped in his plant, it suddenly shuddered in a
+way reminiscent of the death spasm in animals. To determine exactly
+the critical temperature at which death occurred, he invented a **moro-
+graph, or death recorder.** While many plants met their end at sixty
+degrees centigrade, individual plants exhibited variations depending on
+their previous histories and ages. If their power of resistance was artificially depressed by fatigue, or poison, the death spasm would take place
+with temperatures as low as twenty-three degrees Centigrade. At death,
+the plant threw off a huge electrical force. **Five hundred green peas
+could develop five hundred volts,** said Bose, **enough to fulminate a cook
+but for the fact that peas are seldom connected in series.**
+Though it had been thought that plants liked unlimited quantities of
+carbon dioxide, Bose found that too much of this gas could suffocate
+them, but that they could then be revived, just like animals, with oxygen.
+Like human beings, **plants became intoxicated when given shots of
+whiskey or gin,** swayed like any barroom drunkard, passed out, and
+eventually revived, with definite signs of a hangover. These findings
+together with hundreds of other data were published in two massive
+volumes in 1906 and 1907.  Pg 94
+Boses invention the crescograph not only produced a ten-thousand-fold magnification of movement,
+far beyond the powers of the strongest microscope, but could automati-
+cally record the rate of growth of plants and their changes in a period
+as short as a minute.
+Bose showed the remarkable fact that in countless plants, **growth proceeds in rhythmic pulses.** each pulse exhibiting' a
+rapid uplift and then a slower partial recoil of about a fourth the distance
+gained. The pulses in Calcutta averaged about three per minute. By
+watching the progress of the movement on the chart Bose found that **growth in some plants could be retarded and even
+halted by merely touching them, and that in others rough handling
+stimulated growth, especially if they were sluggish and morose.** Pg 99
+---The roots of plants are called "geotropic," because they burrow into
+the soil. Leaves turn to light because they are "heliotropic" or "phototropic." Roots questing water are described as "hydrotropic," and those
+bending against the flow of a stream "rheatropic." The tendril's touch
+is known as its "thigmotropism." Pg 99.
+//
+related libarinth topic//  * [[plant movement]]
+---Bose now in retirement summud his scientific philosophy:
+“Is there any possible relation between our own life and that of the plant
+world? The question is not one of speculation but of actual demonstration
+by some method that is unimpeachable. This means that we should
+abandon all our preconceptions, most of which are afterward found to be
+absolutely groundless and contrary to facts. The final appeal must be
+made to the plant itself and no evidence should be accepted unless **it bears
+the plant's own signature.**
+==== The Metamorphosis of Plants ====
+<html><a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/foam/5603665460/" title="Picture 18 by _foam, on Flickr"><img src="http://farm5.static.flickr.com/4106/5603665460_73b35efe55.jpg" width="75" height="50" alt="Picture 18"></a></html>
+-----------------------------
+=== related libarynth topics ===
+  * [[plant perception]]
+  * [[plant movement]]
+  * [[HPI]]