OBITUARY.

Ashburton Guardian, Volume 58, Issue 39, 25 November 1937, Page 6

OBITUARY.

SIR JAGADIS CHANDRA BOSE. A. FAMOUS INDIAN SCIENTIST. (United Press Association-Copyright.) CALCUTTA, November 23. Sir Jagadis Chandra Bose, the famous Indian scientist who discovered the heart beat in trees, is dead, aged 79. At first devoting himself to electrical research, Bose demonstrated to the British Association in 1896 an apparatus for studying the properties of electric waves which bore a strong resemblance to the coherers used later for wireless. Bose then supplied the methods of the physicist to the animal and vegetable kingdoms. Convinced that the study of plants would help to solve problems of animal life, ho established by his researches the great generalisation of the identical nature of the physiological mechanism in all life, both animal and vegetable. He found that the tree is a colony of innumerable living units, and to ascertain whether the cells in the interior perceived a shock given from outside, he invented his “infinitesimal contraction recorder,” by which the shuddering twitch or cellular contraction under mechanical shbek is shown.

‘One of his experiments proved how plants struggle against death. He sent gradually increasing shocks through a piece of living stem. By means of his magnifying recorder, he showed on a screen the twitch given under a weak shock. When a high-tension current was used, the shuddering convulsions were terrible to see, but they gradually diminished until the plant was dead.

• Bose discovered that plants possess hearts similar to those of animals. He refuted the common theory that the sap rises from the root upwards, demonstrating that it is sent out from the heart . His plant spliygmograph showed on the screen the actual process of the distribution of the sap. He also exhibited by his recording instruments the effect on plants of imbibing water containing other and of poisoning them with bromide or cyanide. Bose actually made a carrot drunk, and l showed on a slide its erratic behaviour when under the influence of alcohol. When given water a plant recorded regular heart-beats, but when dipped in bromide, it gave slower and slower taps as death approached. Un the plant being placed, in caffeine life reasserted itself and the taps gradually returned to regularity. These tests with drugs led to valuable discoveries. Extracts from Indian plants which had been found effective in the botanical experiments were tried on frogs and brought them back to life after the heart had stopped. Their efficacy is far greater than that of any hitherto used, and the investigation will lead to a, new pharmacopoeia for the relief of humanity and the establishment of a vast industry for the utilisation in medicine of indigenous Indian plants. Une ot Bose s drugs now employed in hospitals is a cardiac stimulant of unequalled pow-

er. He has also chronicled the hours of sleep and wakefulness of plants and the effects on them of being tired or ill or wounded showing the reactions of their nerves, which act like those of animals. The rate of their growth—often only 100,000 part of an inch in a second —is recorded by a crescograph, which makes it appear as rapid as the flight of a shell. . Tn lectures in London and Paris Bose showed that it was possible to gauge the sensibility of plants which was 10 times as great as that of man, but slower in transmission so that vegetation stands midway between the lower molluscs and the higher vertebrates. He held that he had justified the old saying: “Never beat a woman, even with a flower, for who knows which of the two suffers most.” In the case of. light, he said, the. human eye responded only to the ether waves between red and violet, but tlie plant also responded to the ultra-violet waves at one end of the spectrum and to the “wireless” waves at the other. A notable discovery by Bose was that it was possible to accelerate or retard the growth of u plant so as to baffle noxious insects. Thus the bollweevil attains maturity when the cotton plant flowers. But, if the flowering is advanced or delayed by a few days, the weevil will arrive and find nothing to attack and it will take many years for the maturity of the weevil and the flowering of the cotton to synchronise again.