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Professor Bose of the University of Calcutta, in experimenting in plant life, constructed an ingenious instrument by which he could measure their growth, though the process, as you know, is imperceptible to the eye. We notice that a plant has grown, but we do not see it in the act of growing, because the extension is so infinitesimal at the instant as to be beyond our perception.

But, as I said, Professor Bose succeeded in getting a measurement by means of the instrument he made for the purpose, and this is what he discovered.

A plant grows upward for five seconds, and then shrinks downward for five seconds. Then it remains motionless for ten seconds, after which it starts upward again and repeats the process just described.

In shrinking downward its motion is slower than in pushing upward, and therefore in the five seconds of shrinkage it does not go clear down to the point it started from. If it did, of course, there would be no increase in height. At each upward push it gains something over the amount of shrinkage, and this gain constitutes the exact measure of its growth at the end of twenty seconds given to pushing upward, shrinking downward and remaining motionless. All of this motion is imperceptible to us, and yet, after a time we say, "How that plant has grown! "

We have always supposed that plants grew right on upward, never dreaming that they shrank downward and even stopped growing entirely, for a while, and yet we might have known the truth