Starch and the Moon

Enchantress ever, the moon has from the first inspired ambiguous conjecture, leaving most men readier to impute to malevolence her obscure government of rhythms in nature than to find benign her whiteness, her remote hauteur. "She is wise," they said, "only to confound; her beauty maketh mad." Yet gardeners, and others whose work is in the earth, have stood to the defense of the cold lady of Heaven. They have declared that seeds sown in the moon's first quarter grow more quickly than those planted in the dark of the moon. They have averred it often, foot on mattock, few but children and naturals believing them. Last week, their contentions were upheld by an English scientist, one Elizabeth S. Semmens. Working under the auspices of the Bedford College for Women, London, she proved that the growth of plants was nourished by moonshine, which is no more than polarized light, a stimulant to the digest of starch. Light consists of vibrations across the line of sight--vibrations up and down, right and left, and all the angles in between. Polarized light is light that has acquired, by reflection, a single group of positive and negative vibrations--vibrations that have motion to and fro in only one line of direction. When polarized light is passed through starch, it is twisted left or right, according to the sugar-content of the starch. This has long been known. Miss Semmen's experiments show that the vibrations themselves have an effect on the starch they pass through. Starch left in the dark underwent no dissolution; exposed to sunlight, it disintegrated slowly; exposed to polarized light, rapidly. The reaction to the rays by starch in living plants was identical. Seeds in the dark grew not at all; seeds in the sunlight grew slowly; seeds in the moonlight grew quickly.