INFLUENCE OF LIGHT UPON PLANTS.
The Power of Movement in Plants,
page 565.
The extreme sensitiveness of certain seedlings to light is highly remarkable. The cotyledons of Phalaris became curved toward a distant lamp, which emitted so little light that a pencil held vertically close to the plants did not cast any shadow which the eye could perceive on a white card. These cotyledons, therefore, were affected by a difference in the amount of light on their two sides, which the eye could not distinguish. The degree of their curvature within a given time toward a lateral light did not correspond at all strictly with the amount of light which they received; the light not being at any time in excess. They continued for nearly half an hour to bend toward a lateral light, after it had been extinguished. They bend with remarkable precision toward it, and this depends on the illumination of one whole side, or on the obscuration of the whole opposite side. The difference in the amount of light which plants at any time receive in comparison with what they have shortly before received seems in all cases to be the chief exciting cause of those movements which are influenced by light. Thus seedlings brought out of darkness bend toward a dim lateral light, sooner than others which had previously been exposed to daylight. We have seen several analogous cases with the nyctitropic movements of leaves. A striking instance was observed in the case of the periodic movements of the cotyledons of a cassia: in the morning a pot was placed in an obscure part of a room, and all the cotyledons rose up closed; another pot had stood in the sunlight, and the cotyledons of course remained expanded; both pots were now placed close together in the middle of the room, and the cotyledons which had been exposed to the sun immediately began to close, while the others opened; so that the cotyledons in the two pots moved in exactly opposite directions while exposed to the same degree of light.
We found that if seedlings, kept in a dark place, were laterally illuminated by a small wax-taper for only two or three minutes at intervals of about three quarters of an hour, they all became bowed to the point where the taper had been held. We felt much surprised at this fact, and, until we had read Wiesner’s observations, we attributed it to the after-effects of the light; but he has shown that the same degree of curvature in a plant may be induced in the course of an hour by several interrupted illuminations lasting altogether for twenty minutes as by a continuous illumination of sixty minutes. We believe that this case, as well as our own, may be explained by the excitement from light being due not so much to its actual amount, as to the difference in amount from that previously received; and in our case there were repeated alternations from complete darkness to light. In this and in several of the above-specified respects, light seems to act on the tissues of plants almost in the same manner as it does on the nervous system of animals.