Plant Autographs and their Revelations

Abstract

PROPOS of the theme under review, it may A be not without interest to mention at the outset that an eminent botanist, the late Sir Francis Darwin, in the course of his presidential address before the British Association in Dublin, so far back as 1908, formulated the opinion that “it is consistent with the doctrine of continuity that in all living things there is something psychic, and if we accept this point of view we must believe that in plants there exists a faint copy of what we know as consciousness in ourselves.” Wherein resided this plant psyche, this faint copy of consciousness? Diffused throughout the cellular elements as in lowly organisms? Our views seemed nebulous; and yet why should they remain so? An oak-tree is as highly developed a representative of the vegetable world as one of the higher vertebrates is of the animal world. It seems in some measure strange that before now some one had not thought of trying to find out if any special system of planttissue had become established which showed definite association with psychic phenomena. We welcome, therefore, an attempt which has been made, through the researches of Sir J. C. Bose, to lift the mist which has so long enshrouded the analogous workings of plant and animal life.

Plant Autographs and their Revelations.

By Sir Jagadis Chunder Bose. Pp. xiv + 231. (London: Longmans, Green and Co., Ltd., 1927.) 7s. 6d. net.