vi PREFACE 



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 per- 

 plexing and intricate. His special and characteristic lines 

 of pioneering have thereby arisen. With this dual outlook 

 and equipment, as physicist he brings to the physio- 

 logist his intellectual and experimental resources with 

 fruitful results to knowledge, and henceforth with trans- 

 formation 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 biog- 

 raphy 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 



