Telegraph Plant (Desmodium gyrans), an Indian leguminous plant. Of its trifoliolate leaves the lateral leaflets, which are small, have, especially in a warm, moist atmosphere, a strange spontaneous motion; they jerk up and down (sometimes 180 times in a minute), as if signalling, and also rotate on their axes (see PLANTS, Vol. VIII. pp. 221, 222).
Telegraph Plant
Chambers's Encyclopaedia, Volume 10: Swastika to Zyrianovsk and Index, p. 109–110
Source scan(s): p. 0128, p. 0129