20 SEPTEMBER 1946, Page 4

Sir James Jeans will be mourned by a much larger

public than most scientists of equal eminence, for he set himself resolutely the task of making science intelligible to the ordinary man. And in a very large measure he succeeded. Some people, of course, are impervious to the most lucid exposition of a subject outside their own field of study, and I confess (not without shame) that I found The Mysterious Universe, which inclusion in the Penguin series did much to popularise, rough going in places. But Jeans depended on the spoken as much as on the written word. His Friday lectures at the Royal Institution before the war were always largely attended, and most deservedly so, for everyone who came was satisfied both as to the lecturer's familiarity with every latest advance in astro- nomical knowledge and as to his complete capacity to convey what he knew. It may be true that in some of his more popular books he occasionally laid himself open to criticism by a certain tendency to dogmatic generalisations, but popular expounders are compelled to be slightly summary in their methods. * *