Sir J. C. Bose delivered the following lecture on the 'Wounded Plants'
at the Bose Institute, on the 7th February, 1919:--
It is a little over four years now that the Embodiment of World Tragedy
stalked over Western Europe. The fair field of France and the bright sky
was under a pall of battle-smoke. Our sight could not penetrate through
the dense gloom, and the mortal cry of the wounded and dying, drowned by
hoarse roar of a thousand did not reach our ear. But from the time the
Sikh and the Pathan, the Gurkha and the Bengali, the Mahratta and the
Rajput flung themselves in front of battle from that day our perception
has become intensified. The distant cry of those whose life-blood has
crimsoned the white field of snow, has found reverberating echo in our
heart. What is that subtle bond by which all distances are bridged over,
and by which an individual life becomes merged in larger life? Sympathy
is that bond by which we come to realise the unity of all life. Before
us are spread multitudinous plants, silent and seemingly impassive. They
too like us are actors in the Cosmic drama of life, like us the play
thing of destiny. In their checkered life, light and darkness, the
warmth of summer and frost of winter, drought and rain, the gentle
breeze and whirling tornadoes, life and death alternate. Various shocks
impinge on them, but no cry is raised in answer. I shall nevertheless
try to decipher some chapters of their life history.
When a man receives a blow or shock of any kind, his answering cry makes
us realise that he is hurt, but a mute makes no outcry. How do we
realise his sufferings? We know it by his agonised look by the
convulsive movement of his limbs, and through fellow-feeling realise his
pain. When a frog is struck it does not cry, but its limbs show
convulsive movement. But from this it does not follow that the frog is
not hurt, for some would urge that there is a great gap between us and
lower animals. One who feels for the humblest of His creatures alone
knows whether the frog is hurt or not. Human sympathy always aspires: it
is sometimes extended to equals, hardly ever to inferiors. And so it
happens that many would doubt, whether the lowly and the depressed
possess the fine sense of the exalted to feel the same joy and sorrow,
and to resent social tyranny. When human attitude is so finely
discriminative as regards different grades of his own species, it might
be extravagant to believe that the frog could have any consciousness of
pain. A concession might however be made that the frog perceives a
shock to which it responds by convulsive movements. It is as well that
we should be careful about the use of terms for an eminent biologist
insisted that animals never felt any pain: when an oyster is swallowed
alive, it did not, according to him, feel any pain but rather a
sensation of grateful warmth at contact with the alimentary tract. The
question will remain undecided for no one has as yet returned from the
gastric cavity of the tiger to expatiate on the exquisite sensation.