52 LIFE AND WORK OF SIR JAGADIS C. BOSE 



for the demonstration of Clerk Maxwell's theory, and the 

 corresponding justification of the young experimenter's 

 labours ; at once raising him from the level of the many 

 dreamers and inventors whom most men despise or ridicule 

 before they succeed, to that pinnacle of success which 

 compels respect and arouses admiration. 



Turn now from experimental process and details to* 

 appreciate the magnitude of Hertz's result, his proof of 

 the real and objective existence of this new range of ethereal 

 vibrations. Not simply as a joy for the mathematicians, 

 whose vigorous method, in Maxwell's powerful hands 

 that of imaged conception, strongly guided L and^boldly 

 driven had thus triumphed, as dramatically as ever 

 of old, say for the first verified prediction of an eclipse, 

 or in later days by the telescopic finding of a new planet 

 in the very place where calculation foretold its presence. 

 Yet the main wonder remained the physical one. For here 

 on one side is light, on which our intellectual life, no less 

 than our practical life, so intimately depends, and as to 

 which, moreover, we have the fullest and longest, the most 

 varied yet also most exact, knowledge of any of the forces 

 of nature. But there on the other hand are the phenomena 

 of electricity and magnetism, so potent and yet so subtle, 

 so varied and complex, so paradoxical, so obscure and even 

 mysterious; and so long defying ordinary representation 

 and visualisation wellnigh altogether. Heat too is organi- 

 cally familiar to us ; and its measurement and observation 

 have been increasingly in progress for centuries. The 

 identification of radiant heat with light, as but a continued 

 spectrum of ultra-red rays, had been in its time, and not 

 so long before, one of the great advances of discovery one 

 readily and essentially connected too with the all-embracing 

 doctrines of energy, so far in its conservation, but especially 

 in its dissipation. The small visible spectrum into which 

 Newton's prism spread out a beam of white light, though 

 ranging through the whole pageant of colour, from red to 

 Violet, had been shown to be but a single octave of a 



