"HEART BEATS" IN TREES

Hawke's Bay Herald-Tribune, Volume 81, Issue 53, 25 November 1937, Page 9

"HEART BEATS" IN TREES

— Pre«» Association )

Discoverer Dies

(Bj Telegrsph-

, CALCUTTA, Nov. 23. j Obituary: Sir Jagadis Chunder Bose, ,the discoverer of the "heaxt-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 Presidescy College, Calcutta. . His first appearance bcfore the British Association, at Liyerpool in 1896, was to demonstrate an apparatus for studying the properties of el§ctric waves. He also invented an instrument for verifying the laws of refraction, xeflection, and polarisation of electric waves. His discovery of a parallelisra in the behaviour of the receiver and o.f the living muscle lcd him to a systemat'ic study of the response of inorganic matter, as well as animal tissues aml plants, to various ' kinds of stimulus. After laborious researches he proved to the satisfaetion of various scientifie 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 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, as 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 in- , clude "Response in the Living and | Non-living," "Plant Response," "The j Physiology of the Ascent of Sap," | "Life Movements in Plants," "Tlie j Nervous Mechanism of Plants,',' "Plant i Autographs and their Revelations," etc.