66 LIFE AND WORK OF SIR JAGADIS C. BOSE 



of such collaboration of the East in the advance of science, 

 but enthusiasm was aroused in the most unexpected 

 quarters. The London Spectator had consistently main- 

 tained a critical attitude towards Indian aspirations ; but its 

 editor was drawn by curiosity to attend Bose's discourses 

 at the Royal Institution ; and in the following week a 

 long leading article appeared, from which the following is 

 an extract : 



There is however, to our thinking, something of rare interest 

 in the spectacle there presented, of a Bengalee of the purest 

 descent lecturing in London to an audience of appreciative 

 European savants upon one of the most recondite branches 

 of modern physical science. It suggests at least the possibility 

 that we may one day see an invaluable addition to the great 

 army of those who are trying by acute observation and patient 

 experiment to wring from Nature some of her most jealously 

 guarded secrets. The people of the East have just the burning 

 imagination which could extort a truth out of a mass of 

 apparently disconnected facts ; a habit of meditation without 

 allowing the mind to dissipate itself, such as has belonged to 

 the greatest mathematicians and engineers ; and a power of 

 persistence it is something a little different from patience 

 such as hardly belongs to any European. We do not know 

 Professor Bose ; but we venture to say that if he caught with 

 his scientific imagination a glimpse of a wonder-working ' ray ' 

 as yet unknown to man but always penetrating ether, and 

 believed that experiment would reveal its properties and poten- 

 tialities, he would go on experimenting ceaselessly through a 

 long life, and, dying, hand on his task to some successor, be it 

 son or be it disciple. Nothing would seem laborious to him in 

 his inquiry, nothing insignificant, nothing painful, any more 

 than it would seem to the true Sanyasi in the pursuit of his 

 inquiry into the ultimate relation of his own spirit to that of the 

 Divine. Just think what kind of addition to the means of 

 investigation would be made by the arrival within that sphere 

 of inquiry of a thousand men with the Sanyasi mind, the mind 

 which utterly controls the body and can meditate and inquire 

 endlessly while life remains, never for a moment losing sight 

 of the object, never for a moment letting it be obscured by any 

 terrestrial temptation. 



