124 LIFE AND WORK OF SIR JAGADIS C. BOSE 



which are from time to time prepared for them, in various 

 countries and their languages. 



Still the reader may reasonably expect some broad 

 indications ; and towards such the writer has laboured. 

 Instead of attempting fully to summarise any of the 

 volumes either singly or in succession, a fresh method has 

 presented itself which, despite its diagrammatic (and there- 

 fore at first sight unfamiliar) aspect, may be found helpful 

 towards expressing the main stages of the active life-work 

 here before us. If we can outline such a graphic present- 

 ment, it should be applicable to kindred interpretations, 

 of scientific work and individual development together. 

 At any rate, as our physiologist has so long been striving 

 to trace the curves of life in plants (and also in animals), 

 let us try to mark down some essentials of his own life- 

 curves of interests and growing achievements, and of his 

 aims beyond. 



As the pool or lake reflects the starry sky, so we may 

 think of the mind of science in general as the would-be 

 complete mirror of the cosmos. But the action of each 

 individual scientific mind, with its own rhythm of growth 

 and development, is like a widening wave-circle, which we 

 watch as it starts from its excited centre and extends 

 upon the surface of the pool. It reflects fresh images to 

 us as it advances ; yet it is none the less the same 

 wave-circle all the time, continuous with its own 

 past, as it- presses on towards its widening future. Its 

 photographs then, at different phases of this development 

 conveniently those of notably vivid reflections to our 

 eyes preserve for us its characteristic record, its essential 

 biography. 



The succession of books just named are, as it were, so 

 many records of what has been fundamentally one and 

 the same thought-advance, in its extension, and also of 

 course in its deepening. Each book is thus a record up to 

 its date of this extending curve, or at least of a large arc 

 of the curve, while this or that intervening paper is a 



