The “brake” is not applied immediately. The maximum efficiency of the far red energy occurs a little more than an hour after the plant is exposed to the formative wavelengths. The implication is that the action interferes with the development process by acting on some product the formation of which is initiated by the shorter red wavelengths. The experiments have been carried out with seedlings of beans. In other experiments it has been found that damage to plants from X-ray exposure—insofar as this results in breaking the bundles of genes, or units of heredity—can be increased from 30 to 50 percent by previous exposure to about the same wave band of far red light that reverses the formative process. On the other hand, the increase in damage is nullified if the X-ray exposure is followed by exposure to the red wave band. Breaking of the chromosomes, or strings of genes, is one of the first evidences of damage to living organisms by exposure to ionizing radiation. This breaking is responsible for some of the adverse hereditary effects concerning which there has been a great deal of discussion because of possible effects of the atomic bomb fall-out. The experiments were carried out with pollen of flowers and root tips of beans where results are relatively easy to determine. _Snails Are the Flowers of the Sea_ There are more than 80,000 kinds of snails in the world. They swim, jump, crawl, burrow, live at the bottom of the sea and in the tops of trees. They range in size from the horse conch of Florida, two feet long, to animals hardly the size of a grain of sugar. About half of all species live in the seas. Most are bottom dwellers, unable to swim, but several spend their lives on the surface. One, the purple janthina, floats upside down on a raft of air bubbles trapped in a special kind of mucous which it secretes. Others live permanently attached to sea weeds. Most abundant of the sea snails probably are the pterepods, or sea butterflies, which live several feet below the surface in daylight but come to the top in countless hordes at night. In some places the sea bottom is littered many feet deep with their shells, of which there is almost constant rain as the animals die. Loveliest flowers of the sea are the nudibranchs. Seldom has nature produced in either plants or animals such elaborate combinations of brilliant colors and decorative appendages as in the bodies of these shell-less ocean snails. Although there are more than 2,000 species, they are among the least known of all sea creatures. One reason for this is that most of them are quite small, ranging from a fourth to half an inch in length. Their coloring hardly can be appreciated except under some magnification.