Page:The Life and Work of Sir Jagadis C. Bose.djvu/9

vii new and strange devices and apparatus, the impression gradually faded. And only in the last two or three years, in Calcutta and at Darjeeling, have I gradually come to know more and more of Bose and of his researches, of his Institute, and of its aims.

All the sciences and all their scientific men are social products, and must be studied as such in the sociological way. This book, though originally planned in its simplest and most direct aspect and purpose—as an exposition of a life-work—is thus something of a sociological study also; and as such, one of its purposes—that of incentive to encouragement and emancipation of the student, of science in general, and in India in particular—may be more clear. For here is, at any rate, no conventional rhapsody on a 'genius,' but an endeavour to see what may be the conditions favourable to life and conducive to full mental stature and productivity; and what the adverse conditions which may arrest, yet may also provoke to, their surmounting. And it is this latter which I wished to make specially clear from the study of Bose's life, so that others also may be encouraged to face their difficulties, and to overcome them as far as may be, towards something greater than merely individual end. Enough then of preface. Any dedication should be to those in memory or still with us, who as we shall find have best helped the hero of this tale upon his life's adventure. Nor should we forget his old teachers, his friends and fellow-workers in science, nor yet his assistants and pupils, by whom his work has also henceforth increasingly to be continued; nor that active youth of the Indian Universities to whom it is so largely addressed.

P. G., 1920.