Differences

This shows you the differences between two versions of the page.

Link to this comparison view

Both sides previous revision Previous revision
Next revision
Previous revision
Next revisionBoth sides next revision
secret_life_of_plants [2011-04-10 18:34] – [Introduction] cockysecret_life_of_plants [2011-04-10 19:01] cocky
Line 357: Line 357:
      
 // //
-related libarynth topic//  [[plant movement]]+related libarynth topic//  [[plant movement]]
  
 ---Bose now in retirement summud his scientific philosophy: ---Bose now in retirement summud his scientific philosophy:
Line 367: Line 367:
 made to the plant itself and no evidence should be accepted unless **it bears  made to the plant itself and no evidence should be accepted unless **it bears 
 the plant's own signature.**  the plant's own signature.** 
 +---------------
  
 ==== The Metamorphosis of Plants ==== ==== 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>+<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>---Why botany, a potentially fascinating subject dealing with plants, living  
 +and extinct, their uses, classification, anatomy, physiology, geographical  
 +distribution, should have been from the beginning reduced to** a dull  
 +taxonomy, an endless Latin dirge**, in which progress is measured more  
 +by the number of corpses cataloged than by the number of blossoms  
 +cherished, is perhaps the greatest mystery in the study of plant life. Pg 104  
 + 
 +**The pollen of most plants has a highly inflammable character**; when  
 +thrown on a red-hot surface it will ignite as quickly as gunpowder.  
 +Artificial lightning was formerly produced on the theatrical stage by  
 +throwing the pollen grains of the Lycopodium or club mosses onto a hot  
 +shovel. In many plants the pollen diffuses an odor bearing the most  
 +striking resemblance to the seminal emission of animals and man.  
 +The spermatozoa of certain mosses carried in the morning dew in search of females, is guided by its taste for malic acid toward the delicate cups at the bottom of  
 +which lie moss eggs to be fertilized. **The spermatozoa of ferns**, on the  
 +other hand, liking sugar, **find their females in pools of sweetened water**. Pg 107 
 + 
 +---For years Goethe had been distressed by the limitations involved in a merely analytical and  
 +intellectual approach to the plant world, typified by **the cataloging mind  
 +of the eighteenth century**, and of a theory of physics, then triumphant,  
 +which submitted the world to blind laws of mechanics, to a "jeu de  
 +rouages et de ressorts sans vie." 
 +------------------- 
 +==== Plants Will Grow to Please ==== 
 +<html><a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/foam/5603665318/" title="Picture 15 by _foam, on Flickr"><img src="http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5221/5603665318_63b05a2493.jpg" width="54" height="98" alt="Picture 15"></a></html>---Gustav Theodor Fechner (1839):  “Was it not one of the ultimate purposes of the human bodies to serve vegetal life, surrounding it by emitting carbon dioxide for the plants to breathe, and manuring them with human bodies after death? Did not flowers and  
 +trees finally consume man and, by combining his remains together with raw earth, water, air, and sunlight, transform and transmute human bodies into the most glorious forms and  
 +colors?  
 +---------- 
 + 
 +===== Tuned to the Music of the Spheres ===== 
 + 
 +==== The Harmonic Life of Plants ==== 
 +  
 +<http><a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/foam/5603081267/" title="Picture 14 by _foam, on Flickr"><img src="http://farm5.static.flickr.com/4097/5603081267_92481df2e3_s.jpg" width="50" height="50" alt="Picture 14"></a></http>---In 1950 T. C. Singh, head of the department of botany at Annamalai University , 
 +began wondering whether sound, properly prescribed, could spur field crops to greater yields. From 1960 to 1963 he piped the "Charukesi raga" on a **gramophone via a loud-  
 +speaker to paddy rice growing in  
 +the fields** of seven villages on the Bay of Bengal, and got harvests ranging consistently from  
 +25 to 60 percent higher than the regional average. He also was able  
 +musically to provoke peanuts and chewing tobacco into producing nearly  
 +50 percent more than normal. Singh further reported that merely by  
 +dancing the "Bharata-Natyam," India's most ancient dance style, with-  
 +out musical accompaniment and executed by **girls without trinkets on their ankles, the growth of Michaelmas daisies, marigolds, and petunias  
 +was very much accelerated**, causing them to flower as much as a fort-  
 +night earlier than controls, presumably because of the rhythm of the  
 +footwork transmitted through the earth.  
 + 
 +---  
 +In the mid-1960s two researchers at Canada's University of Ottawa, Mary  
 +Measures and Pearl Weinberger were conversant that ultrasonic frequencies markedly affect the germination and growth of  
 +barley, sunflower, spruce, Jack pine, Siberian pea tree, and other seeds  
 +and seedlings However, the very  
 +frequencies which stimulated some plant species inhibited others. They wondered whether specific audible frequencies in  
 +the sonic range would be as effective as music in enhancing the growth  
 +of wheat.  
 +In a series of experiments lasting more than four years, the two  
 +biologists exposed the grains and seedlings of spring Marquis and winter  
 +Rideau wheat to high-frequency vibrations. They found that, depending  
 +on how long the wheat seeds had been vernalized, **the plants responded  
 +best to a frequency of 5,000 cycles a second**.  
 + 
 +---1973 Dr. Weinberger said **basic farm equipment of the future will include an oscillator** for production  
 +of sound waves and a speaker." He set up large-scale tests to determine the practicability of their idea.  
 +they discovered that experimental "pink" noise, which, at 20 to 20,000 cycles per second and 100 decibels, sounds to the ear about the **same as the noise received 100 feet  
 +away from a 727 jet plane** about to take off, caused turnips to sprout much faster than those left silently in the ground. Pg 152 
 + 
 +Allotting one chamber for a control group, Mrs. Dorothy Retallack, a Danish professional organist and mezzo soprano in 1968 used the  
 +same plants, as in the first experiment,  
 +setting them in identical soil and affording them equal amounts of water  
 +on schedule. Trying to pinpoint the musical note most conducive to  
 +survival, each day she tried an **F note, played unremittingly for eight  
 +hours in one chamber** and three hours intermittently in another. In the  
 +first chamber her plants were **stone dead within two weeks**. In the  
 +second ·chamber, the plants were much healthier than controls left in  
 +silence.  
 + 
 +---The cucurbits were hardly indifferent to the two musical forms: those  
 +exposed to Haydn, Beethoven, Brahms, Schubert, and other eighteenth-  
 +and nineteenth-century European scores g**rew toward the transistor  
 +radio**, one of them even twining itself lovingly around it. The other  
 +squashes grew away from the rock broadcasts and even tried to climb  
 +the slippery walls of their glass cage. Pg 154 
 +The plants gave positive evidence of **liking Bach, since they leaned 
 +an unprecedented thirty-five degrees toward the preludes**. But even this  
 +affirmation was far exceeded by their reaction to Shankar: in their  
 +straining to reach the source of the classical Indian music they bent  
 +more than halfway to the horizontal, at angles in excess of sixty degrees,  
 +**the nearest one almost embracing the speaker**.  
 + 
 +--Jazz caused her a real surprise. When her plants heard recordings as  
 +varied as Duke Ellington's "Soul Call" and two discs by Louis Arm-  
 +strong, 55 percent of the plants leaned fifteen to twenty degrees toward  
 +the speaker, and growth was more abundant than in the silent chamber. Pg 156 
 + 
 +-------------------------- 
 + 
 ----------------------------- -----------------------------
  
  • secret_life_of_plants.txt
  • Last modified: 2011-04-23 19:50
  • by 87.210.211.132