20 LIFE AND WORK OF SIR JAGADIS C. BOSE 



this union the one may be redeemed from its too common 

 triviality, or worse : the other from its too common dullness, 

 and worse ; and thus may come, through these together, 

 the needed renewal of popular culture as well. 



Return from such forecasts of the coming education of 

 the next generation to the early days of our elder one, fifty 

 years ago ; and so start with young Jagadis at his next 

 school. At this time his father was transferred to Western 

 Bengal, as the Assistant-Commissioner of Burdwan. By 

 nine years old his vernacular grounding, on which his father 

 had so wisely insisted, was secure enough to justify his 

 sending him now to a higher English school ; and so, after 

 three months at the Hare School in Calcutta, he was sent 

 to the more strictly English teaching of St. Xavier's. 

 Even then it was introducing that high educational 

 tradition of the Jesuits which, despite Protestant and other 

 ill will, has made their teaching respected in all lands. 

 Still, we scientific men cannot but plead for further progress 

 into that fuller life of all studies with which the Jesuits, 

 and more or less all other Western schools, so vividly began. 

 Hence, as indeed for most of us in East or West, the boy's 

 real and inward education was largely left in his own hands, 

 and in those of external circumstances, and these were 

 not without their painful sides. The school was almost 

 exclusively of English boys, themselves but little acquainted 

 with Bengali, and that not of the best ; so little Jagadis's 

 situation was perplexing, with only a beginning of English, 

 enough to puzzle out sentence by sentence, but not really 

 to read, much less to talk. Moreover, while the other boys 

 were at home in the great city, the newcomer was completely 

 a country boy, with no previous town experience at all, 

 and with his familiar world suddenly left behind, and of 

 little avail, save as a solace of memory. After the teasings 

 and baitings which new boys have so often to suffer, 

 there came the compulsory fight ; in this case quite 

 normally as boys' stories go with a substantially bigger 



