FEVER IN PLANTS | AdventAI

Pacific Press Publishing Company · Oakland, California · Jan 20, 1898

FEVER IN PLANTS.

WHEN plants are wounded their respiration increases, and at the same time their temperature perceptibly rises, as if a kind of fever had been produced by the wound. Mr. H. M. Richards, who has been experimenting with a thermo-electric apparatus capable of registering a change of one one-hundredth of a degree, states that when a potato was wounded a fever manifested itself by an elevation of temperature, which was greatest at the end of twenty-four hours, when it began slowly to decline. An onion similarly treated acquired an increase of temperature many times greater than that shown by the potato, and the fever, instead of being confined to the neighborhood of the wound, affected the entire onion. In fact, the onion proved to be more readily affected in this way than any other vegetable experimented with. The rise of temperature is caused by increased absorption of oxygen.

Thrice-a-Week World.