Plant Autographs and Their Revelations by Sir Jagadis Chunder Bose

Plant Autographs and Their Revelations, Sir Jagadis Chunder Bose. Longmans, Green, and Co. Ltd., London. 1927 printing. No copyright page. A much shorter version was published in 1915 by the U.S. Government Printing Office. Good hardcover with fair dustjacket. The soiled and stained dustjacket has one large missing section on the back and 4 smaller chips. The blue cloth cover has significant dings on the upper corners, bleached areas at the spine top and bottom, and some edge wear. Previous owner’s signature on the front free end paper. Stains on either side of gutter on early blank pages. Mottled stains following the half title page. Tanned, unmarked pages and tissue covering the frontispiece. Bent upper page corners. Numerous pen and ink drawings (including the crescograph Bose invented and demonstrated to Paramahansa Yogananda), graphs, and photos.

Jagadis Chandra [Chunder in the book] Bose, the famous Indian physicist and plant physiologist, lived in the same neighborhood as Paramahansaji’s parents. The great guru visited Bose on a few occasions when he was a young man and attended the opening of the Bose Institute to hear the scientist’s speech, which he later quoted sections of in his chapter “India’s Great Scientist, J. C. Bose” in Autobiography of a Yogi. The appendix includes a significant portion of his inaugural speech. Bose’s studies of plant physiology showed plants’ sensitivity to various stimuli, recorded by the crescograph and other instruments.

Bose’s speech at the dedication of the Bose Institute of Science appears in the February 1938 of Sri Yogananda’s magazine, Inner Cuture. He had recently died, and a tribute to him also appears in this issue, along with a poem dedicated to him by Rabindranath Tagore.