The Voice of the Inaudible
IN the heart of trees and plants runs a rhythm as planned, as orderly, as susceptible to the shudder of fear or to the jubilance of life as the pulse that beats in our own veins. Sir Jagadis Bose has told us that before, and I have written in the Spectator of the moral he points (with graphs instead of dialectic) that the stream of thought which has enriched mankind through- out the centuries flows towards unity and inter-depen- dence in all creation.
Our senses cannot record these hidden things of the field and forest, but they exist none the less. Our hearts, instead of dancing with the daffodils, arc moved to desire by their beauty ; we take and carry them dying to our dwellings ; we want to know the name of every to that blooms and every bird that sings, in order to pluck it or kill it, adorning ourselves as a savage with scalps. No one, I think, who heard Bose's new lecture, given at UniVersity- College hist Tuesday, but will have gained something at least of a new feeling for life thereby. The lecture dealt with new types of super-sensitive recorders, magnifying more than a million times, which Sir Jagadis has recently evolved at the Bose Institute in Calcutta, and which are now revealing the profundities of plant life. We need not understand plant-physiology in order to follow the drift of his thought. He is one of those who fix the ladders between Heaven and Charing Cross.
Beyond the world of our senses, we have always been told of paradisal fields. But lately they have been dis- cernible to the eyes of reason as well as those of faith— to the great profit of some people and the disgust of others. In mathematics we have only to consider things like 11, zero, infinity, to reach a breezing intellec- tual Everest where our senses gasp. There are the splendours of the sunset there and infinite dawns, but we cannot sustain mental life for long in such rarefied regions. Yet the adventurers made, and are still making, some very practical discoveries in such places, where only symbols survive, and the engineer with his slide rule does half his work by means of knowledge about numbers which has been snatched from these borderlands touched by questing brains. In plant physiology, exploration leads us to the same altitudes, beyond which we may not go, but they do not seem so chilly. With Bose as guide the voyage does not strain unduly such powers of attention as I possess. We may see the heart-beat of a frog, or the peristasis of a plant, or the death-struggle of a mimosa in the electric chair : these things are not the secrets of life itself, but they seem closer to the heart of Nature than we have ever been before. At any rate, they widen our consciousness and stretch our imagination. When you have seen the shuddering twitch of cellular contraction that takes. place in the electrocuted mimosa, you will realize the range of your own ignorance of what happens on this earth, above and below our " numbed conceiving."
A wave-length of light is about one-fifty thousandth part of an inch : that is the amount that the " muscles ". of a mimosa will twitch when it gives up its life for us in a moment or two. We want to see how it dies, not from idle curiosity, let us hope, but so that through the mechanisms of life revealed by probing to its inmost heart we may know "the beat of far-off seas."
The martyr mimosa is now being strapped into its death-chair, with moist bands of linen to heighten the flow of current that will kill it. She is calm as yet, poor mite, and heedless of the cruel energies Bose will unleash when he presses a button. An S-shaped ray- of light on the screen shows us her quiescent cells, living their lives as best they may, not so happily perhaps in this reek of London as under Indian skies, but at peace with the world. _Fate is _ at her elbow, very literally. Siva the destroyer has followed her from. Ganges-land : riding no longer the bull as his vehicle, but the wires of an electric circuit. Now a feeble current is sent through the body, and the atomic universes of which the mimosa is composed are swayed by a new impulse :— " The suns of space, that burn
Unspent, their watches hold, The hosts that turn and still return Are swayed and poised and rolled."
Watch the cataclysm. A high-voltage current drones through the machine like the thunders of a tiny Apoca;. lypse. We hear the destroying voice. We see the S on the screen being jerked leftward as she dies. It is dark in the hall. There is the growl of the destroyer— Electricity. There is Bose with a billiard cue, pointing silently to the light of the mimosa's life, twitching away. It is off the screen now. One more growl. Another convulsion—the light has run right round to the back of the hall—to the back of beyond, if I may use so convenient and unscientific a phrase. The switch is unmade. We probe the plant again. It is still, with the stillness of eternity. Once-more the current is passed- through its cells, but the voice of death has spoken., There' is no response from the luminous record. of the mimosa. A little universe has gone. Has it suffered in its .passing ?.. Who can say- ? .
" There has been a prevailing idea," says Bose, " that plants are inexcitable and insensitive to blows from outside.' That world of delusion has now been dispelled. We are at the brink of great discoveries, he tells us; regarding the properties of drugs, whose action can be studied very conveniently on plants, now that the general similarity of their response (in all three life- manifestations of conductivity, contractibility and rhyth- micity) to that of animals has been proved. There is a range of Indian plants with medicinal properties hitherto unsuspected awaiting experiments which these new instruments have made possible. Some of these, Sir Jagadis believes, will be of value to our pharmacopoeia: He has invented a " Resonant Cardiograph " which is a miracle -of skilful design, but too corriplicated to explain in detail here, Very briefly, the heart-beat of an animal or the similar. contractile rhythm that propels sap in a plant or tree is. tuned to a writing instrument in such a manner that not only .is every. delicate and• infinitesimal movement recorded, but the errors . of friction and adjttstment are eliminated. Thus the different phases of pulsation can be obSerVed and studied- with an unprecedented accuracy. _ The heart beat of a frog was displayed on the screen. Pilocarpine was given to it,- and under the -influence of this depressant the 'beat became feebler and feebler. Soon ' it would have passed. that strange dividing line beyond which, to our seeming at any rate," It would interlock with the rigidity of death. But now the lecturer administered the stimulant atropine. Pulsations revived and the fainting heart grew normal. There was no frog,- by the way. How its heart came there I did not inquire,- but let us hope the owner had died a natural death. - What results shall- we achieve by such inquiries ? The possibilities are many. For- myself, I do not believe' that much that is useful to man can be learned by experiments with living animals or plants. We have too many medicines already, too many Methods 'of minimizing the result of our mistaken living, which we call disease. I may be wrong. Obviously, however, researches such as these have intellectual and philoso-
phical as well as purely medical consequences of the greatest importance ; one need not enumerate them, for they are obvious to anyone who cares to think for himself.
" Out of the imperfections of his senses," says Bose, " man has built himself a raft of thought to adventure into the seas of the Unknown. Where visible light ends, he still follows the invisible ; where the note of the audible reaches the unheard, even there he gathers the tremulous message." We have in Bose and his students, minds that have grown up in a scientific culture which can far more readily assimilate the new knoWledge of the infinitely great and infinitely little than otirieIves; whbae activities are canalized into channels Which, if they run deep are too often narrow. We knoW little of the Afterwards, except what we see of the Present, We see more now than ten years ago. Before I die, perhaps I shall track a little further to the lair of life the spirit of that mimosa whose reflection flicked off the 'screen and passed behind me.
F. YEATs-Baowx.
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