Makers of British Botany; a collection of biographies by living botanists
History
Makers of British Botany; a collection of biographies by living botanists
Botanists -- Great Britain -- Biography; Botany -- Great Britain -- History
4 × 34 or 136 inches or in one hour to 28·3 cm.[33] This is a result
comparable to, though very much smaller than, Sachs' result with the
sunflower, viz. 63 cm. per hour.
The data are however hardly worth treating in this manner. But it
is of historic interest to note that when Sachs was at work on his
_Pflanzenphysiologie_, published in 1865, he was compelled to go back
nearly 140 years to find any results with which he could compare his
own.
We need not follow Hales into his comparison between the "perspiration"
of the sunflower and that of a man, nor into his other transpiration
experiments on the cabbage, vine, apple, etc. But one or two points
must be noted. He found[34] the "middle rate of perspiration" of a
sunflower in 12 hours of daylight to be 20 ounces, and that of a "dry
warm night" about 3 ounces; thus the day transpiration was roughly
seven times the nocturnal rate. This difference may be accounted for by
the closure of the stomata at night.
Hales of course knew nothing of stomata, but it is surprising to find
Sachs in 1865 discussing the problem of transpiration with hardly a
reference to the effect of stomatal closure.
Hales[35] notes another point which a knowledge of stomatal behaviour
might have explained, viz. that with "scanty watering the perspiration
much abated," he does not attempt an explanation but merely refers to
it as a "healthy latitude of perspiration in this Sunflower."
In the course of his work on sunflowers he notices that the flower
follows the sun, he says however that it is "not by turning round with
the sun," i.e. that it is not a twisting of the stalk, and goes on to
call it _nutation_ which must be the _locus classicus_ for the term
used in this sense.
An experiment[36] that I do not remember to have seen quoted elsewhere
is worth describing. It is one of the many experiments that show the
generous scale on which his work was planned. An apple bough five feet
long was fixed to a vertical glass tube nine feet long. The tube being
above and the branch hanging below the pressure of the column of water
would act in concert with the suck of the transpiring leaves instead of
in opposition to this force. He then cut the bare stem of his branch
in two, placing the apical half of the specimen (bearing side branches
and leaves) with its cut end in a glass vessel of water, the basal and
leafless half of the branch remained attached to the vertical tube of
water. In the next 30 hours only 6 ounces dripped through the leafless
branch, whereas the leafy branch absorbed 18 ounces. This, as he says,
shows the great power of perspiration. And though he does not pursue
the experiment, it is worthy of note as an attempt like those of
Janse[37] and others to correlate the flow of water under pressure with
the flow due to transpiration.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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