FAMOUS SCIENTIST.

Manawatu Standard, Volume LVII, Issue 306, 25 November 1937, Page 18

FAMOUS SCIENTIST.

LATE SIR: JAGADIS CHUNDER BOSE.

Sir Jagadis Chunder Bosd, whose death was reported in the “Standard” yesterday, was born in 1858, and after graduating from St. Xavier’s College. Calcutta, he entered Christ’s-College Cambridge, gaining high honours in 1884. In 1885 he became professor ol physical science at the Presidency College, Calcutta. His first appearance before the British Association, at Liverpool in 1896, was to demonstrate an apparatus for studying the properties of electric waves. He also invented an instrument for verifying the : laws of refraction, reflection, and polarisation of electric waves. His discovery of a parallel in the behaviour of the receiver and of the living muscle led him to a systematic study of the response of inorganic matter, as well as animal tissues and plants, to various kinds of stimulus. After laborious researches lie proved to the satisfaction of various scientific bodies . tliat the life mechanism of a plant is identical with that of an animaL His crescograph is a recorder of plant growth capable of magnifying a small movement as much as 10,000,000 times. In 1915 he became professor emeritus of the Presidency College and thereafter devoted hjmself to founding -the Research Institute in Calcutta which bears his name. The list of his honours is a long one. He was made a, Commander of the Order of the Indian Empire in 1903. received the Star of India in 1911, and was knighted in 1917. He was an F.R.S., an. honorary doctor of science of the Universities of Calcutta, Lahore, Allahabad, and Benares, an honorary LL.D. of Aberdeen, a corresponding member of the Aca-: demy of Sciences of Vienna, and an honorary member of the Societas Scientarum Fennica. His publications include “Response in the Living and Non-Living,” “Plant Response,” . “The Physiology of tlie Ascent of Sap,” “Life Movements in Plants,” “The Nervous Mechanism of Plants,” “Plant Autographs and their Revelation,” etc.