OBITUARY

Wanganui Chronicle, Volume 80, Issue 280, 25 November 1937, Page 7

OBITUARY

SIR J. C. BOSE Received Nov. 24, 7.5 p.m. CALCUTTA, Nov. 23. Obituary: Sir Jagadis Chuder Bose, the discoverer of the “heart-beat” of trees. Sir Jagadis Chunder Bose was born in 1858 and after graduating from St. Xavier’s College, Calcutta, he entered Christ’s College, Cambridge, gaining high honours in 1884. In 1885 he became Professor of Physical Science at the Presidency College, Calcutta. His first appearance before the British Association, at Liverpool in 1896, was to demonstrate an apparatus for studying the properties of electric waves. He also invented an instrument for verifying the laws of refraction, reflection, and polarisation of electric waves. His discovery of a parallelism in the behaviour of the receiver and of the living muscle led him to a systematic study of the response of inorganic matter, as well as animal tissues and plants, to various kinds of stimulus. After laborious researches he proved to the satisfacI tion of various scientific bodies that the life mechanism of a plant is identical with that of an animal. His crescograph is a recorder of plant growth capable of magnifying a small movement as much as 10,000,000 times. In 1915 he became professor emeritus of the Presidency College and thereafter devoted himself to founding the Research Institute in Calcutta which bears his name. The list of his honours is a long one. He was made a Commander of the Order of the Indian Empire in 1903, received the Star of India in 1911, and was knighted in 1917. He was an F.R.S., an honorary Doctor of Science of the Universities of Calcutta, Lahore, Allahabad, and Benares, an honorary LL.D, of Aberdeen, a corresponding member of the Academy of Sciences of Vienna, and an honorary member of the Societas Scientarum Fennica. His publications include “Response in the Living and Non-living,” “Plant Response,” “The Physiology of the Ascent of Sap,” “Life Movements in Plants,” “The Nervous Mechanism of Plants,” “Plant Autographs and their Revelations,” etc.