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The Second Lesson: Omnipresent Life.725
metals and animals—some exciting; some depressing; some killing. Some
poisonous chemicals killed pieces of metal, rendering them immobile and
therefore incapable of registering records on the apparatus. In some cases
antidotes were promptly administered, and saved the life of the metal.
Prof. Bose also conducted experiments on plants in the same way. Pieces
of vegetable matter were found to be capable of stimulation, fatigue,
excitement, depression, poison. Mrs. Annie Besant, who witnessed some
of these experiments in Calcutta, has written as follows regarding the
experiments on plant life: “There is something rather pathetic in seeing the
way in which the tiny spot of light which records the pulses in the plant, travels
in ever weaker and weaker curves, when the plant is under the influence of
poison, then falls into a final despairing straight line, and—stops. One feels
as though a murder has been committed—as indeed it has.”
In one of Prof. Bose’s public experiments he clearly demonstrated that
a bar of iron was fully as sensitive as the human body, and that it could
be irritated and stimulated in the same way, and finally could be poisoned
and killed. “Among such phenomena,” he asks, “how can we draw the line of
demarkation, and say, ‘Here the physical ends, and there the physiological
begins’? No such barrier exists.” According to his theory, which agrees with
the oldest occult theories, by the way, life is present in every object and
form of Nature, and all forms respond to external stimulus, which response
is a proof of the presence of life in the form.
Prof. Bose’s great book is full of the most startling results of experiments.
He proves that the metals manifest something like sleep; can be killed;
exhibit torpor and sluggishness; get tired or lazy; wake up; can be roused
into activity; may be stimulated, strengthened, weakened; suffer from
extreme cold and heat; may be drugged or intoxicated, the different metals
manifesting a different response to certain drugs, just as different men
and animals manifest a varying degree of similar resistance. The response
of a piece of steel subjected to the influence of a chemical poison shows
a gradual fluttering and weakening until it finally dies away, just as animal