Page:The Life and Work of Sir Jagadis C. Bose.djvu/8

vi simply a physicist of fine experimental skill, and of full subtlety, but also a naturalist of the keenest interest in life-processes and life-movements, and these among the most perplexing and intricate. His special and characteristic lines of pioneering have thereby arisen. With this dual outlook and equipment, as physicist he brings to the physiologist his intellectual and experimental resources with fruitful results to knowledge, and henceforth with transformation of laboratories of physiology and their standards of observation and research by the refinement of his new methods and appliances. Rarer still, he has not only divined in matter, as sometimes did physicists before him, 'the promise and potency of life,' but has experimentally demonstrated, as in seeming inert metals, not only a strangely life-like passivity to environment, but a yet more life-like reactivity to it as well.

Here, then, is offered some account of pioneerings in discovery, and of the type and personality of the pioneer also. In science we need more and more of both, in the East no doubt; but in the West likewise. Hence the present outline of main scientific results and biographic sketch together.

And though alike in scientific summary and in biography the less the writer obtrudes himself the better, a few words of personal explanation are permissible, even customary in any preface. Though primarily of biological interests and trainings, I felt in student days the wonder and call of the physical sciences, and realised something of their bearings on physiology. As for some forty years a teacher and investigator in botany and more of physiological and evolutionary interests than of traditional ones, I have constantly felt my limitations in vegetable physiology in general, and with regard to plant-movements in particular; and thus to some extent realised the interest of Bose's work when I first met him nearly twenty years ago, and when later I read a volume he sent me. But in the press of other work and without actual acquaintance with his