STUDY OF PLANTS

Evening Star, Issue 19712, 12 November 1927, Page 4

STUDY OF PLANTS

LOVE AMD GET MAD [Fiioki Our Coruespon’de.nt.] SAN FRANCISCO, October 17.; Expressions '.of rage, love, jealousy, fear, (desire, and the like aro not limited to the human and animal races, at least, so affirms Professor Craig Staunton, British botanical authority, of Cambridge, England, .who is on a visit to Chicago ’ making a study _of plant life indigenous to that section of tho earth.

“In my studies I hayo learned that everything that grows is capable of a literal feeling,” ho declared. “Among the uioro highly organised species of plant life the whole emotional gamut can be found—sorrow, hato. Jeai, and tho rest. 1 have watched love affairs among the flowers. 1 have seen a flower die of ‘grief because the hie in another plant had' withered. To deny, at this late day, the attributes of sex to plants is to deny them life, which ■ may, perhaps, indicate why many of tho t botanical studies conducted at the schools are fallacious.” Tho botanist admitted that long years of training are essential to the development of the faculties for the perception of plant life. Merely to appreciate tho beauty of flowers is no gateway to an understanding of them. “There are, however, certain experiments that even a layman- can make,’ lie said. “For instance, plant two pansies in a single flower pot. Lot them develop side by side (< so to speak, from seedlings to maturity. Then kill ono and watch the other closely. Inevitably the surviving pansy will pine away and die of grid. “By long association together these, pansies have become mutually dependent. If their sexes wore different, their reciprocal attraction amounted to love.” Like other famous experimentalists—notably Dr Jagadis Chundar Bose, of Calcutta, India—Professor Staunton has obtained curious results with drugs applied to plant life. Ho told of a rose slip that became a morphine addict—as so many human beings do—after lie had administered to it several doses of the narcotic. And, like a human addict, the plant suffered' when deprived of the drug alter it had become a habitual, need. . “That plant showed its suffering plainly,” Professor Staunton said, “by drooping its leaves and indicating in other ways,, perceivable only-to acutely trained students of plant life, its depression. And, like the human dope addict, who brightens up when a drug is brought to him even : before he has been given it, so this plant actually quivered with hope when I approached with a hypodermic needle. Its relief was clearly to bo seen after an injection. It would pork up unmistakably.” , , Professor Staunton also cited, ns an illustration of tho universality of feeling that exists throughout the world, the love affair that enmeshed throe violets.