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- | related libarynth topic// | + | related libarynth topic: // [[plant movement]] |
---Bose now in retirement summud his scientific philosophy: | ---Bose now in retirement summud his scientific philosophy: | ||
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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' | the plant' | ||
+ | --------------- | ||
==== The Metamorphosis of Plants ==== | ==== The Metamorphosis of Plants ==== | ||
- | < | + | < |
+ | and extinct, their uses, classification, | ||
+ | distribution, | ||
+ | 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**; | ||
+ | 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 ==== | ||
+ | < | ||
+ | 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 Harmonics of plants// | ||
+ | |||
+ | < | ||
+ | began wondering whether sound, properly prescribed, could spur field crops to greater yields. From 1960 to 1963 he piped the " | ||
+ | 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 " | ||
+ | out musical accompaniment and executed by **girls without trinkets on their ankles, the growth of Michaelmas daisies, marigolds, and petunias | ||
+ | was very much accelerated**, | ||
+ | night earlier than controls, presumably because of the rhythm of the | ||
+ | footwork transmitted through the earth. | ||
+ | |||
+ | --- | ||
+ | In the mid-1960s two researchers at Canada' | ||
+ | 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." | ||
+ | they discovered that experimental " | ||
+ | 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' | ||
+ | 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 | ||
+ | |||
+ | -------------------------- | ||
+ | ==== Plants and Electromagnetism ==== | ||
+ | < | ||
+ | continually being **affected by wavelengths of the electromagnetic spectrum**, from earth, moon, planets, cosmos and from a proliferation of | ||
+ | man-made devices; only it remains to be established exactly which are | ||
+ | beneficial and which are harmful. Pg 163 | ||
+ | |||
+ | ---1747, Jean Antoine Nollet, a French abbot and physics tutor, was informed by a German physicist in Wittenberg that | ||
+ | water, which normally issued drop by drop from a capillary tube, would | ||
+ | run out in a constant stream if the tube was electrified. Nollet put several plants in metallic pots next to a conductor and was intrigued to note that the rate of their transpiration | ||
+ | increased. In a long series of experiments, | ||
+ | only daffodils but sparrows, pigeons, and cats** and found they **lost weight | ||
+ | faster if electrified**. | ||
+ | |||
+ | ---Italian physicist, Giuseppe Toaldo reported that in a row of jasmine bushes the two which were next to a lightning conductor grew thirty feet tall whereas all the | ||
+ | others attained only four feet. Pg 168 | ||
+ | |||
+ | ---Bertholon, | ||
+ | dener stand on a slab of insulating material and sprinkle vegetables from | ||
+ | an electrified watering can. He reported that his salads grew to an | ||
+ | extraordinary size. He also invented what he called an **" | ||
+ | it through plants growing in a field. "This instrument is | ||
+ | applicable to all kinds of vegetal production, everywhere, in all weather.” | ||
+ | |||
+ | |||
+ | ---On a clear day in good weather the earth has a negative electrical | ||
+ | charge while the atmosphere is positive, electrons stream skyward from | ||
+ | the soil and plants. During storms the polarity is reversed, the earth | ||
+ | becoming positive and the base of the cloud layer negative. Because | ||
+ | there are at any time an estimated three to four thousand " | ||
+ | storms raging over the surface of the globe, the charges lost by the earth | ||
+ | in those areas favored by balmy weather are thus replaced, and a seesaw- | ||
+ | ing balance of electrical gradients maintained. Pg 175 | ||
+ | |||
+ | --As it had been known that sharp points | ||
+ | were especially attractive to atmospheric electricity, | ||
+ | that "**the sharp points of plants acted like lightning rods to collect | ||
+ | atmospheric electricity** and facilitate the exchange of charges of the air | ||
+ | and the ground." | ||
+ | |||
+ | |||
+ | ---London Journal of the Horticultural Society published the " | ||
+ | garden plots, and, tried burying them under the soil. But of | ||
+ | Solly' | ||
+ | only nineteen were of any benefit, and nearly as many were harmful. | ||
+ | The conflicting results of these researchers made it obvious that the | ||
+ | amount, quality, and duration of electrical stimulation was of crucial | ||
+ | importance to each form of vegetal life. Pg 174 | ||
+ | |||
+ | ---Lemstrom connected a series of flowers in metal pots to a static generator by an overhead network of wires sixteen inches above them and a | ||
+ | pole set into the soil as a ground. Other pots he "left to nature." | ||
+ | eight weeks, the electrified plants, showed gains in weight of nearly 50 | ||
+ | percent over their electrically deprived neighbors. When he transferred | ||
+ | his apparatus into a garden he not only more than doubled the yield of | ||
+ | strawberries but found them to be much sweeter; his harvest from barley | ||
+ | plants increased by one-third. He reported | ||
+ | Agriculture and Horticulture**// | ||
+ | |||
+ | ---Later Sir Oliver Lodge allowed the | ||
+ | movement of people, animals, and farm equipment through his **electrified fields**, by suspending a grid on insulators attached to high poles. | ||
+ | During one growing season Lodge was able to increase the per-acre yield | ||
+ | of wheat by 40 percent and was pleased that the | ||
+ | bakers who used flour ground from it claimed it produced bread of a far | ||
+ | better quality than that made from the wheat they were normally furnished. Pg 176 | ||
+ | |||
+ | |||
+ | |||
+ | |||
+ | |||
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