History of botany, 1530-1860 / by Julius von Sachs ; authorised translation by Henry E.F. Garnsey ; revised by Isaac Bayley Balfour.

  • Sachs, Julius, 1832-1897.
Date:
1906
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Licence: In copyright

Credit: History of botany, 1530-1860 / by Julius von Sachs ; authorised translation by Henry E.F. Garnsey ; revised by Isaac Bayley Balfour. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by Royal College of Physicians, London. The original may be consulted at Royal College of Physicians, London.

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    position of carbon dioxide which does not take place in the dark, yet he gave an example of genuine scientific investiga- tion and again expressed its true spirit, when he said that the Linnaean phrase, ' the sleep of plants,' was unsuitable, because the sleeping leaves are not relaxed, but continue as stiff as in the day-time. De CandoUe also, like Senebier, experimented in 1806 on the influence of light on vegetation, and succeeded in proving that the daily period of leaves may be reversed by artificial illumination; he was, as we have said above, an adherent of the theory of a vital force, but only made use of it when physical explanations failed him. The same year (1806) is the date of a brilliant discovery, which was extremely inconvenient to the thorough-going adherents of the nature- philosophy and the vital force, and did much to bring the scientific study of the movements of plants back to the right path. Andrew Knight^ showed by experiment that the ver- tical growth of stems and primary roots is due to gravitation; he attached germinating plants to a rapidly revolving wheel, and thus exposed them to the centrifugal force, either alone or combined with gravitation; the radicles, which normally follow gravitation, here took the direction of the centrifugal force, while the stems assumed the opposite direction. The next ques- tion was, why gravitation makes the roots and stems take exactly opposite directions, why, that is, in a plant placed in a hori- zontal direction, the root-end curves downwards and the stem upwards. Knight supposed that the root, being of a semi- fluid consistence, is bent downwards by its own weight, while the nutrient sap in the stem moves to the underside and causes stronger growth there, until by means of the curvature so pro- duced the stem assumes the upright position. Here too, as in Dodart's case, it was no great misfortune that the explanation proved afterwards to be insufficient; it served at the time to ^ Thomas Andrew Knight, President of the Horticultural Society, was born at Wormsley Grange, near Hereford, in 1758, and died in London in 1838.