Abstract
THE ninety-sixth annual meeting of the Société Helvétique des Sciences Naturelle was held, as already announced, at Frauenfeld in September. The set discourses were largely attended, and were listened to with considerable interest. Prof. Grubemann, in his lecture on the most recent methods employed in petrography, referred especially to the evolution of rocks, and the bearing of metallography and the chemistry of colloids on his subject. Prof. Maillefer gave an account of his researches on the geotropism of plants, partly from an experimental and partly from a mathematical point of view. He claimed to have proved that gravity has an effect on the curvature of a plant which requires time to take effect, and may be expressed by saying that the curvature possesses a velocity proportional to the sine of the angle made by the plant with the vertical and an acceleration proportional to the time of exposure. The effect is, he said, felt by the plant from the outset, though the time measurements seem to depend on the instruments used in the observations. His results were in a subsequent communication partly corroborated by Dr. Tröndle, who, however, does not admit the presence of an acceleration.
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The Frauenfeld Meeting of the Swiss Society for the Advancement of Science . Nature 92, 240–241 (1913). https://doi.org/10.1038/092240b0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/092240b0