4i6 



NATURE 



[June 3, 1920 



wrote " The Piper of Hell " — " O have ye heard 

 of Angus Blair, Who lived long since in black 

 Auchmair? " and a more terrible and cruel ballad 

 still— "Who hath not met Witch Margaret? Red 

 gold her rippling hair. . , . Come up and you 

 shall see her yet, Before she groweth still ; Before 

 her cloak of flame and smoke The winter air 

 shall fill ; For they must burn Witch Margaret 

 Upon the Castle Hill." 



Together with these Edinburgh worthies we 

 may say a passing word of two Dublin physicians 

 of the last generation, George Sigerson and John 

 Todhunter. They were both of them fervid 

 writers of Celtic poetry, and have a notable place 

 in their country's undoubted literary renaissance. 

 Irish patriotism inspired them both, in a way that 

 we little understand — as when Todhunter cries 

 out "O thou Swan among the nations, 

 enchanted long, so long That the story of thy 

 glory is a half-forgotten song." He was a power- 

 ful and influential singer, a true Irish Tyrtaeus ; 

 for it was he who wrote "There's a spirit in 

 the air, Says the Shan Van Vocht " ; just as 

 another learned brother-scholar and fellow of 

 Trinity College, Dublin (not a physician, how- 

 ever), boldly sang : "Who fears to speak of '98? " 

 and sang it to only too receptive ears. 



But I have gone farther afield than I ever 

 meant to go, and I have left myself all too little 

 room to write of Sir Ronald Ross, the last of 

 our poet-physicians. Most of his poetry was 

 written in India, in Madras or Burma or the 

 Andamans, while he was engrossed in the study 

 of the pathology of malaria, and during earlier 

 years when he began to think and dream over 

 the eternal problems of the East. Sir Ronald's 

 love and reverence for science, and his admiration 

 for those who have shown and followed the way 

 of discovery, are deeper because far more experi- 

 enced than Akenside's : "Tho' we may never 

 reach the peak, God gave this great command- 

 ment, Seek." 



It is not the wealth and splendour of the East 

 that touch his imagination ; but, looking with the 

 physician's charitable eyes, he broods over the 

 decadence, the misery, the widespread sickness 

 of its people : " The leprous beggars totter 

 trembling past. The baser sultans sleep." A 

 famine-stricken girl is suckling her three-year- 

 old : "' I am too poor,' she said, ' To feed him 

 otherwise,' and with a kiss Fell back and died." 

 It is all a gloomy picture. But if its blackness 

 be somewhat overdrawn (and I hope and think 

 it is) its pessimism is inspired and redeemed by 

 charity and pity, by resolution to understand, and 

 NO. 2640, VOL. 105] 



by ambition to relieve. Sir Ronald's second 

 volume, though tragic enough, is in a happier 

 strain. 



Only a few days ago, lecturing to my class 

 of some eighty young men and women newly 

 entered a week before upon their medical course, 

 I tried to tell them what the Protozoa meant to 

 our fathers, and what (thanks " to Pasteur and 

 Grassi and Manson and Bruce and Ross and many 

 another) they have come to mean to us. In my 

 student-days, an Amoeba, a bell or slipper animal- 

 cule, a little ooze from the Atlantic, a few pretty 

 radiolarian or foraminiferal shells, gave us our 

 outline-concept of the Protozoa. To-day a new 

 world is opened, in which we hear of tiny things 

 with strange life-histories, of momentous chains 

 of cause and consequence wherein rat and louse 

 and gadfly and mosquito play their insidious part> 

 bringing fever to the swamp and murrain to the 

 plain ; we are told at last of mysterious maladies 

 explained, of epidemics held at bay, of territories 

 and peoples emancipated from disease. And then> 

 as an example of the spirit of the scientific 

 physician, of aims conceived, of dreams come 

 true, I ventured to read them a couple of Ronald 

 Ross's early verses, written before he and his 

 fellow-workers had brought their hopes to 

 fruition : — 



In this, O Nature, yield, I pray, to me. 



I pace and pace, and think and think, and take 

 The fever 'd hands, and note down all I see, 



That some dim, distant light may haply break. 



The painful faces ask, Can we not cure? 



We answer, No, not yet; we seek the laws. 

 O God, reveal thro' all this thing obscure 



The unseen, small, but million-murdering- cause. 



My students listened and went quietly away, 

 and I could see by their faces that they had heard 

 the words of the poet and the physician as though 

 he were speaking straight to them. 



D'Arcv W. Thompson. 



Movements of Plants. 



Transactions of the Bose Research Institute^ 

 Calcutta. Vol. ii., Life Movements in 

 Plants. By Sir Jagadis Chunder Bose. 

 Pp. V+xiv^- 253-597. (Calcutta: The Bose 

 Research Institute, 1919.) Price io5. 6d. 



IN this the second volume of the Transactions 

 of the Bose Institute, Sir Jagadis Bose con- 

 tinues to pour out his almost overwhelming wealth 

 of observations. The first chapter of the volume 

 deals with a piece of apparatus to be used with 



