A WREATH - OF JASUINE , TT. was the dark, wet afternoon
of Derby Day, not on Epsom Downs, but in the hall of the Royal Society of Medicine. Sir Jagadis •Chander Bose held us spellbound. Curious intruments stood on the lecture table, under it a potted mimosa .was trying to bask in artificial sunlight.
"This poor little plant is rather depressed and no wonder," he said in his quick, pleasant voice, "but it's .alive in spite of your climate and so I shall be able to show you its nerve impulses and its reactions to various drugs."
We looked and listened, watched and wondered. "Snip, snip,", went, the scissors of Sir Jagadis, severing a branch which he inserted into his wonderful recording apparatus. A needle pierced its (relatively) shrinking skin and recorded its. living heart-beats, magnified a millionfold, for all, the world to see. • "The pulse will grow. fainter and fainter, of course," said Sir. Jagadis, "zs. it bleeds to death."
Of course ! . We stared at the spot of light that recorded this death-struggle. A little bromide administered to the poor mimosa made it almost die, thyroid extract made. it .skittish, cobra venom produced first a strange stimulus, then the death pang : all this is recorded by an instrument which magnifies so inconceivably that the pace a a snail would become eight times faster than a bullet. This has been, reported in the Press, and it is. all—or mostly—true. Carrots can get drunk and write the scrawling story of their dissipation. Plants tell Sir Jagadis how they feel when he shocks them by a loud noise : fat ones feel it less than their slender and more sensitive sisters. This is a tale that has been told : its beginnings axe important.
It was in 1896 that Sir Jagadis first made his mark. Lecturing before the Royal Society on electrical vibrations he drew a picture of man's immersion in the multitudinous waves of an etheric sea. It was a prophetic speech. He imagined an unseen hand Producing organ notes of varying vibrations :— - "—as the ether note rises higher in pitch we shall for a brief moment perceive a sensation of -warmth. As the note rises still higher, our eyes will begin to be affected, a red glimmer of light would be the first to make its appearance . . . the few colours we see are comprised within a single, octave . of- vibration, from 400 to 800 billions a second . . . as the frequency rises still higher our organs of percep`tion fail us completely. . . -. The brief flash of light is succeeded by unbroken darkness. . . . But we have already caught glimpses of invisible lights . . "
This was a remarkable . utterance to . have been made thirty years ago ! Even now it has an uncommon ring.
The Spectator was early. aware of the importance of these experiments. What we wrote thirty years ago cannot be bettered to-day :- "There is something of rare interest in the spectacle of a Bengalee of the purest descent lecturing in London to an audience of appre- ciative European savants Upon one of the most recondite branches of modern physical science. • It suggests at least the possibility that we may one day see an invaluable addition to the great army of those who are trying. . . to wring from Nature her most jealously guarded secrets. The people of the East have just the burning imagination which could extort truth out of a man of apparently disconnected facts ; a habit of meditation without allowing the mind to dissipate itself, such as has belonged to the greatest mathe- maticians and engineers. . . . . We can see no reason why the Oriental mind, turning from its absorption in insoluble problems, should not betake itself ardently, thirstily, hungrily, to the research into Nature which can never end, yet is always yielding results . . . upon which yet deeper enquiries can be based. If that happened— and -Professor Bose is at all events a living evidence that it -can happen—that would be-the greatest addition ever made to the sum of the mental force of mankind."
The prediction has been justified. Sir Jagadis Bose has, been a daring adventurer on uncharted seas. Who but he would have left his brilliant electrical research -to study the stresses of steel ? Who but he would have thought of poisoning metals in order to prove the similarity of response between " living " and "none living " ? Who but he would have turned again from this field, disdaining its spoil, to challenge the most eminent plant physiologists on their own ground—and with no mechanical equipment save what he could fashion for himself in Calcutta ? Three times in thirty years he has astounded the world with the results of his researches, first 'in electricity, then in physics, then in physiology.. Not only were machines lacking, but funds. He was a poor University professor and he would not profit by the valuable patent rights he might have acquired through his inventions. -But money came to him in all sorts of ways. A friend left him a bequest, investments prospered, every penny he and his devoted wife could save went to his researches. The astonishing result is that Sir Jagadis has been able to give £100,000 to the crown of his life-work, the Bose Institute, where he now has twenty pupils in training to carry his torch down the -years.
More money is needed and more will doubtless come, for the Institute is now famous all over the world. India has taken her place as a leader in research, restating in terms of science "that message proclaimed by my. ancestors" (['quote Sir Jagadis) "on the banks of the Ganges thirty centuries ago—They who see the One, in all the changing manifoldness of this universe, unto them belongs eternal truth, unto none else, unto none else.'" Of the man himself little has been written. • The plants ' whose intimate drama he displays to the eerie ticking of an electric metronome are warrant enough for publicity, but he does not -seek it. About his personality little has appeared in England: I have heard Sir Jagadis Bose lecture, as did the writer • of the Spectator article of -thirty years ago and have alsc spent some happy hours in his company. The dominant impression is of an amazingly flexible mind, a mind tem- pered by meditation, yet untrammelled in its range. It . is this resilience which is the fine flower of the Hindu system : an invincible, perhaps immortal quality, which has given a permanence to the Indian civilization such • as no other nation has approached. In Sir Jagadis the . culture of thirty centuries has blossomed into a scientific brain of an order which we cannot quite duplicate in the West. We have the courage, the quickness, perhaps the' , intuitive faculty, and among our best intellects the same "horse-power," but we find in him a spiritual sense difficult to define, intangible yet evident, pre-eminently of the East : the quality out of which all great faiths .
, have grown.
Sir Jagadis has the eyes of a poet and the hands of a - craftsman. He dreams as a mystic and he experiments as a meticulous agnostic. He is a prince among physio- logical research workers, and a prophet of this age which has brought so many new powers to life. These are high words—but the fruitage of the life work of Sir Jagadis Bose is too imposing in quality and volume to hesitate about using superlatives.
His life, and the life of Lady Bose, who is an exemplar of the graces and wifely devotion of Indian womanhood, is entirely given to the Institute that bears his name. It is a threshold whence we may see visions of a future emancipated by science, as a worshipper in an Indian temple may see, from the glare and din without, the cool shadow of an inner shrine. Beyond that lie other shrines, other mysteries. If we in the West will help in the building of this temple our labour will be a thousand- fold repaid.
To the fanes of India the devout bring offerings of white Jasmine, symbols of the pure in heart. It is such a wreath that Sir Jagadis has laid upon the scientific altars of the West.
•
F. YEATS-BROWN.
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