From Mark Elvin, Long Hanborough, Oxfordshire, UK
I look forward to reading Monica Gagliano's book Thus Spoke the Plant, and wish her the very best of success (24 November, p 40). Research into plant sentience has a patchy but interesting and important history.
The first work devoted to it that I know of was a 1688 doctoral dissertation attributed to Johannes Mauchartus, the Disquisitio botanica de Herba Mimosa seu Sentiente (“Botanical disquisition on the Mimosa or Sentient Plant”). The main author of this was probably Rudolph Jacob Camerarius, his supervisor, whose experiments decisively proved the presence of reproduction by sexual means in flowering plants.
Serious popular literature includes Daniel Chamovitz's 2012 What a Plant Knows and Dov Koller's 2011 The Restless Plant . My favourite, which deals with many other subjects as well, remains Rodolfo Llinás's I of the Vortex: From neurons to self (reviewed 25 August 2001, p 52). Llinás discusses tunicates (sea squirts) some of which start life as free-swimming larvae with a rudimentary nervous system.
Once settled, these larvae digest most of their rudimentary brain and live more or less like a plant. The need to handle irregular movement in an extended space in the first stage but not the second may explain the probable original function of a sizeable part of the early brain.
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