Botanist Bose on Secret Life of Plants (SRF)

Paramahansa Yogananda, Autobiography of a Yogi (1946 ed.), Chapter 8; Eds., Wisdom Quarterly

India's Great Scientist, J.C. Bose

Bose, Royal Inst London, 1897

"[Sir] Jagadish Chandra Bose's wireless inventions antedated those of Marconi." Overhearing this provocative remark, I walked closer to a sidewalk group of professors engaged in scientific discussion. If my motive in joining them was racial [nationalistic] pride, I regret it. I cannot deny my keen interest in evidence that India can play a leading part in physics, and not metaphysics alone.

"What do you mean, sir?"

Plants and  metals feel, Bose's instruments show.

The professor obligingly explained. "Bose was the first one to invent a wireless coherer and an instrument for indicating the refraction of electric waves. But the Indian scientist did not exploit his inventions commercially. He soon turned his attention from the inorganic to the organic world. His revolutionary discoveries as a plant physiologist are outpacing even his radical achievements as a physicist." 

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I politely thanked my mentor. He added, "The great scientist is one of my brother professors at Presidency College." 

I paid a visit the next day to the sage at his home, which was close to mine on Gurpar Road. I had long admired him from a respectful distance. The grave and retiring botanist greeted me graciously. He was a handsome, robust man in his fifties, with thick hair, broad forehead, and the abstracted eyes of a dreamer. The precision in his tones revealed the lifelong scientific habit. 

"I have recently returned from an expedition to scientific societies of the West. Their members exhibited intense interest in delicate instruments of my invention which demonstrate the indivisible unity of all life [Footnote 1]. The Bose crescograph has the enormity of ten million magnifications. The microscope enlarges only a few thousand times; yet it brought vital impetus to biological science. The crescograph opens incalculable vistas."

The Secret Life of Plants

"You have done much, sir, to hasten the embrace of East and West in the impersonal arms of science." 

"I was educated at Cambridge. How admirable is the Western method of submitting all theory to scrupulous experimental verification! That empirical procedure has gone hand in hand with the gift for introspection which is my Eastern heritage. Together they have enabled me to sunder the silences of natural realms long uncommunicative. The telltale charts of my crescograph [2] are evidence for the most skeptical that plants have a sensitive nervous system and a varied emotional life. Love, hate, joy, fear, pleasure, pain, excitability, stupor, and countless appropriate responses to stimuli are as universal in plants as in animals." 

"The unique throb of life in all creation could seem only poetic imagery before your advent, Professor! A saint I once knew would never pluck flowers. 'Shall I rob the rosebush of its pride in beauty? Shall I cruelly affront its dignity by my rude divestment?' His sympathetic words are verified literally through your discoveries!" 

"The poet is intimate with truth, while the scientist approaches awkwardly. Come someday to my laboratory and see the unequivocable testimony of the crescograph." 

Gratefully I accepted the invitation and took my departure. I heard later that the botanist had left Presidency College and was planning a research center in Calcutta. 

Botanist Jagadish Chandra Bose

When the Bose Institute (boseinst.ernet.in) was opened, I attended the dedicatory services. Enthusiastic hundreds strolled over the premises. I was charmed with the artistry and spiritual symbolism of the new home of science. Its front gate, I noted, was a centuried relic from a distant shrine. Behind the lotus [3] fountain, a sculptured female figure with a torch conveyed the Indian respect for woman as the immortal light-bearer. The garden held a small temple consecrated to the Noumenon beyond phenomena. Thought of the divine incorporeity was suggested by absence of any altar-image. 

Bose's speech on this great occasion might have issued from the lips of one of the inspired ancient rishis. 

"I dedicate today this [Bose] Institute as not merely a laboratory but a temple." His reverent solemnity stole like an unseen cloak over the crowded auditorium. "In the pursuit of my investigations I was unconsciously led into the border region of physics and physiology. To my amazement, I found boundary lines vanishing, and points of contact emerging, between the realms of the living and the non-living. Inorganic matter was perceived as anything but inert; it was athrill under the action of multitudinous forces. 

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"A universal reaction seemed to bring metal, plant, and animal under a common law. They all exhibited essentially the same phenomena of fatigue and depression, with possibilities of recovery and of exaltation, as well as the permanent irresponsiveness associated with death.

"Filled with awe at this stupendous generalization, it was with great hope that I announced my results before the Royal Society — results demonstrated by [reproducible] experiments.

"But the physiologists present advised me to confine myself to physical investigations, in which my success had been assured, rather than encroach on their preserves." More

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1. "All science is transcendental or else passes away. Botany is now acquiring the right theory -- the avatars of Brahma will presently be the textbooks of natural history." - Emerson from the Latin root crescere, to increase. For his crescograph and other inventions, Bose was knighted in 1917.

2. The lotus flower is an ancient divine symbol in India; its unfolding petals suggest the expansion of the soul; the growth of its pure beauty from the mud of its origin holds a benign spiritual promise.

3. "At present, only the sheerest accident brings India into the purview of the American college student. Eight universities (Harvard, Yale, Columbia, Princeton, Johns Hopkins, Pennsylvania, Chicago, and California) have chairs of Indology or Sanskrit, but India is virtually unrepresented in departments of history, philosophy, fine arts, political science, sociology, or any of the other departments of intellectual experience in which, as we have seen, India has made great contributions....We believe, consequently, that no department of study, particularly in the humanities, in any major university can be fully equipped without a properly trained specialist in the Indic phases of its discipline. We believe, too, that every college which aims to prepare its graduates for intelligent work in the world which is to be theirs to live in, must have on its staff a scholar competent in the civilization of India." - Extracts from an article by Professor W. Norman Brown of the University of Pennsylvania which appeared in the May 1939 issue of the Bulletin of the American Council of Learned Societies, 907 15th St., Washington, D. C., 25ø copy. This issue (#28) contains over 100 pages of a "Basic Bibliography for Indic Studies."