Review | The Man Who Made Plants Write: Jagadish Chandra Bose’s essays rediscovered

Jagadish Chandra Bose struck a plant with a cane and then, with a watch in hand, waited for it to forgive him. Growth stalled, then resumed half an hour later. From this small cruelty he drew a large lesson — that injury stunts the sapling as surely as it stunts the schoolboy hit by a cane-wielding headmaster, and that the plant, like the boy hauled up by the ears, keeps account of what is done to it.