Plant and Animal Much in Common.

Star (Christchurch), Volume XLIV, Issue 189, 11 August 1931, Page 8

Plant and Animal Much in Common.

Nature Notes

By James Drummond. F.L.S.. F.Z.S.

r JpIIE SYMPTOMS of death in plants, such as drooping, withering and discolouration, do not manifest themselves at the moment of death, but much later, but at the moment of death violent excitation is developed in the plant’s tissue. A fairly large number of experiments seem to show that the rhythmic mechanism in plants and in animals is essentially similar. There are drugs that cause arrest of the heart and drugs that revive its activity. The same drugs applied to the pulsating leaflets of plants produced the same effects. By using remarkably delicate instruments. Sir Jagadis Chunder Bose, founder and director of the Bose Research Institute, Calcutta, claims to have proved that somewhere in the interior of every plant there is an active tissue whose pulsation, on the principal of a pump, affects the propulsion of the sap, in the same way as the pulsation of the heart maintains the circulation of the blood in animals. The venom of a cobra permanently stops pulsation, causing the plant’s death. All the results obtained show that the mechanism for the propulsion of sap in a plant is similar in principal to the mechanism for circulating blood in an animal.