236 LIFE AND WORK OF SIR JAGADIS C. BOSE 



towards placing the Institute on a permanent basis, the 

 extent of which will be proportionate to the public interest 

 in this undertaking. Out of those who would feel an 

 interest in securing adequate endowment, the very first 

 contributions have come from two from a distant province, 

 to whom I had been personally unknown. 



INDIA'S SPECIAL^APTITUDES IN CONTRIBUTION TO 

 SCIENCE 



The excessive specialisation of modern science in the 

 West has led to the danger of losing sight of the funda- 

 mental fact that there can be but one truth, one science 

 which includes all the branches of knowledge. How chaotic 

 appear the happenings in Nature ! Is Nature a Cosmos, 

 in which the human mind is some day to realise the uniform 

 march of sequence, order and law ? India through her 

 habit of mind is peculiarly- fitted to realise the idea of 

 unity, and to see in the phenomenal world an orderly 

 universe. This trend of thought led me unconsciously to 

 the dividing frontiers of different sciences and shaped the 

 course of my work in its constant alternations between 

 the theoretical and the practical, from the investigation of 

 the inorganic world to that of organised life and its multi- 

 farious activities of growth, of movement, and even of 

 sensation. On looking over the different lines of investi- 

 gations carried on during the last twenty-three years, I 

 now discover in them a natural sequence. The study 

 of Electric Waves led to the devising of methods for 

 the production of the shortest electric waves and these 

 bridged over the gulf between visible and invisible 

 light ; from this followed accurate investigation on the 

 optical properties of invisible waves, the determination of 

 the refractive powers of various substances opaque to light, 

 the discovery of the effect of air film on total reflection and 

 the polarising properties of strained rocks and of electric 

 tourmalines. The invention of a new type of self-recovering 



