eyes; but how it becomes a disqualification, how to know Mughal history becomes tantamount to ignorance of European history passes our understanding. Prof. Sarkar may have written an original work covering only one-sixth of the syllabus; but that does not show that he is inferior to another man who has not written any original work covering even a hundredth part of the syllabus.

Mr. Smith knows the German, French and Italian historians. But these may be read in translations, too. Mr. Sarkar knows the Persian historians and writers of semihistorical works, most of which have not been published or translated and some of which he has been the first to discover and collect Mr. Smith has travelled in Europe for months. Mr. Sarkar has travelled in India year after year with an historical object in view. It is a misfortune that in India the history of India is an unimportant of branch historical study; but nevertheless we venture to think that a man who writes an original work on Indian history does not disqualify himself for the work of teaching history.

In the Report of the Patna University Committee extracts have been made with approval from the Report of the Royal Commission on the University of London. The following passages occur in the London Commission's Report :

"In a University, knowledge should be pursued not merely for the sake of the information to be acquired, but for its own extension and always with reference to the attainment of truth. . . We may assume that University teaching is suited to adults; . . that it aims not so much at filling the mind of the student with facts or theories, as at calling forth his own individuality and stimulating mental effort; that it accustoms him to the critical study of the leading authorities. The student so trained gains an insight into the conditions under which original research is carried on. . . . It is the personal influence of the man doing original work in his subject which inspires belief in it, awakens enthusiasm, gains disciples. . . Neither is it the few alone who gain; all honest students gain inestimably from association with teachers who show them something of the working of the thought of independent and original minds." (Paragraphs 66-69.)

Bearing the above observations in mind the reader may decide for himself whether a man who in addition to reading the works of great historians has written an original work himself is more fitted to be a professor than one who has simply read what others have written.

The Statesman seeks to convey the impression that Prof. Sarkar has written only

Principal Archbold of Dacca College has circulated some proposals for reforming the Calcutta University. We are in sympathy with his suggestion that every Principal of a college should be "ex officio" a member of the Senate. But we do not think that it would be good for the stu dents or for the country to vest a committee of the heads of Colleges with those powers which are at present exercised by the Syndicate with regard to the admission of students to examinations and other similar matters.

In theory a professor may be a more suitable person to exercise University functions than a busy Calcutta lawyer or doctor, "however eminent in his particular sphere." But in India lawyers and doctors in private practice are in a position to be more independent than the professors of even private colleges; and they bring a fresh mind to bear on University questions. Moreover, the fact that even in England lawyers and politicians are elected Rectors of Universities shows that they are not unfit to advise on matters educational. It is also a question as to who is to be called a professor and who not. It is well known that the Dacca and Patna University Commitees in their Reports are disposed to make the Professorships virtually a monopoly of I. E. S. men. It is also no longer a secret that there is an official proposal before the Royal Public Services Commission that the distinction between the P. E. S. and I. E. S. should be done away with and the following new arrangement be made in the near future.

To label certain posts as "Professorships" and attach to them fixed salaries, which will not vary (as now) with their holders' position in the graded list of the service. These "Professors" will be the highest education officers and form the top of the academic hierarchy. "Indians will have an opportunity of promotion to this superior grade."

As has been shown in the article on "The

latest Simla Jugglery" in our April number, this means that Indians as a rule will continue to occupy inferior posts in the educational service as now and will have the additional disadvantage of not being called professors.

So we are not in favour of making professors the predominant factor in the senate, unless it is clearly known who these professors are.

2. We should like to see the work of the University carefully arranged with a view to the best interests of the Colleges. We believe that this will only be secured by harmonious arrangements made in consultation with the Colleges and that no good will come of building up a separate and to some extent rival organisation in which the Colleges feel they have no part or lot. Hence we think that on any Board which deals with the post-graduate teaching of the University the Colleges should be very fully recognised.

This means that the University M. A. classes should be abolished. The University used to be found fault with for not being a teaching body. Now that it does teach, it must be condemned on some other ground. Very few Colleges can teach the M. A. courses, and those which can, take only a few students. We, therefore, think it absolutely necessary that the University M. A. classes should continue to exist. They are doing good work.

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Mr. Archbold would like to see minerships given to professors actually engaged in teaching the subjects in which candidates are to be examined. This was the former practice, but it was abandoned on finding that some professors (among them were Europeans) used to communicate to their students the questions they were going to set for the university examinations.

4. We are anxious that some approach to the proper relation of teacher to student should be attemp

ted.

With this end in view we should suggest that the numbers allowed to be present at one time in a lecture should be steadily lessened. The present tendency seems in the opposite direction.

This proposal would have been worthy of consideration if Mr. Archbold had also proposed that the present number of colleges should be trebled or at least doubled and had also suggested the ways and means for founding and maintaining the additional number of colleges. There is an increasing demand for collegiate education, and every year many student fail admission. Under such circumstances, the proposal to reduce the number of students in a class without increasing

to get

The German Universities are not residential, they do not house and overseer the students, and yet they have produced a nation of scholars, thinkers, scientific discoverers, inventors and captains of industry not inferior to those of any other nation. Let our students be better housed and better overseered, if possible, but that is certainly not the first and most urgent need.

Whatever the first and most urgent need may be, foreign teachers of our youth will please note that we do not believe that it is an urgent need that under some pretext or other the number of students in receipt of education should be reduced or should not go on increasing.

"Ex Oriente Lux."

"Lens" writes the following article in The New Statesman under the above heading on Dr. J. C. Bose's work in England :—

When an infinite capacity for taking pains is employed by genius, which is an infinite capacity for not needing to take pains, the results may well be substantial. Some seven years ago, when Dr. Jagadis Chunder Bose, Professor of Physics in the University of Calcutta, was in this country, he showed me, at the Davy-Faraday Laboratory of the Royal Institution certain instrumental devices for the detection and appreciation of delicate physiological reactions which had already yielded him some notable fruit, recorded in his Plant Response. I took occasion in the follow

ing year to comment on his admirable work, and especially to insist upon the services to physiology which were being rendered by an independent thinker, himself a trained physicist, and by race and tradition indifferent to the arbitrary barriers which we customarily set up between one science and another. For, if we mean what we say when we speak of the Universe, there can be no separate sciences, but only Science; and the epoch-making steps may be those which men of genius take through such barriers as the insubstatial phantoms that they are. Like other bugbears, they have their votaries, and the worker who ignores them may expect to be ignored. But I believe that the opinion I expressed in 1908 of Professor Bose's work will be very generally held ere long. His recent demonstrations in Oxford and Cambridge gave great satisfaction, and the same is true of his recent "Friday evening discourse" at the Royal Institution, which it was my good fortune to miss-good fortune because last week I had a demonstration to myself instead at Dr. Bose's private laboratory near Maida Vale, more satisfactory than any public lecture could be. HIS ACHIEVEMENT.

It is long since the students of animal physiology put a smoked paper upon a revolving drum, and caused

an isolated "nerve-muscle preparation" to record its response to stimuli by a tracing upon the paper. Dr. Bose has applied almost incredible patience and ingenuity to the invention of an apparatus which advances this principle in such a degree that the rhythm of a plant leaflet, which contracts after (or before) the fashion of the animal heart, the depression and depth of such a leaflet when poisoned by alcohol, cyanide of potassium or other general poisons of living protoplasm, can be recorded, together with an automatic timing apparatus which writes, in effect, to the thousandth of a second. These experiments, and many more, I saw last week, and they abundantly justify the following words, quoted from the preface to Professor Bose's new book, Researches on Irritability of Plants: "In order that the results obtained should not be influenced by any personal factor, it would be further desirable that the plant attached to the recording apparatus should be automatically excited by stimulus absolutely constant, should make its own responsive record, going through its own period of recovery, and embarking on the same cycle over again without assistance at any point on the part of the observer. In presenting the results of these investigations, it will be noted that the plant has been made to tell its own story, by means of its self-made records. Each experiment has been repeated at least a dozen times, in many cases as often as a hundred times. The results may therefore be accepted as fully attested. The establishment of the unity of responsive reactions in the plant and animal, which is the subject of this work, will be found highly significant, since it is only by the study of the simpler phenomena of irritability in the vegetal organisms that we can ever expect to elucidate the more complex physiological reactions in the animal tissues."

HIS APPARATUS.

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In this assertion of the fundamental identity of response in plant and animal, and the demonstration that all plants, and not merely that of which Shelley sang, are sensitive, we have, of course, a large philosophical conclusion, a priori probable. But discovers who proves," and the proof in this case could be obtained only after the invention of means observation sufficiently delicate and accurate. This super-refinement of the existing apparatus is an achievement in itself, and must very favourably affect the development of, especially, electro-physiology; but the results already obtained by Professor Bose himself are sufficiently remarkable.

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By automatic means, wholly eliminating the personal equation, Professor Bose has been able to show and measure the sensitivity of all plant tissues-a piece of turnip, say, no less than Mimosa-to both electrical and mechanical stimuli; Doctors may find analogies in their nervous practice to both of these states, and may realise that the stimulating remedy which will save one patient may finish the next, failing the differential diagnosis the basis of which Professor Bose has reduced to the simplest terms by the cunning simplicity of which he is a master.

AN APPEAL TO LORD Crewe.

Such men are rare in India, an admirer told me

lately. They are rare anywhere, and the infant science of eugenics is likely to be a Methuselah before they are less so. There is an obvious form of recognition which our Royal Society may pay Dr. Bose, but that is a trifle compared with the incredible fact that a worker of this quality and rarity is to-day unprovided, in his own University, with any laboratory where his work can be properly carried forward. The old idea of University as a collection of books has not yet yielded place to the truth. The Indian Universities were founded as examining bodies, have done some teaching since, no doubt, but still await their true development into places where Truth is wrested from the Unknown, for the service of mankind. "I make not, therefore, my head a grave, but a treasure, of knowledge," wrote Sir Thomas Browne. The library, or "collection of books," is too often a mere cemetery of knowledge; a real University is a treasure of that most treasurable kind, which gives itself freely to all and yet ever accumulates. Lord Crewe's predecessor in the Secretaryship of State for India might be expected to prefer the literary conception of a University, but Lord Crewe himself, who inherits from his distinguished father interest in science, and who is himself Chairman of the Governing Body of the Imperial Technical College, cannot, I believe, fail properly to value such a growing point of vital knowledge as is the work of Professor Bose. Clearly to focus that remarkable work for the eye of Lord Crewe is the present purpose and hope of the writer.

The Komagata Maru.

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The Komagata Maru has sailed from Canada, the Government of that country having paid the fares of the passengers and provisioned the ship. That Government had proposed to bind them in chains and deport them. Though that intention was not carried out, the very threat is extremely humiliating. A private message has also been received from Vancouver by the Khalsa Akhbar of Lyallpur to the effect that "an unsuccessful midnight attack was made by 400 armed police on the Komagata Maru passengers and it is not known how many died or were wounded."

insult and exclude us in this way. She is Canada ought not to be allowed to self-governing only by favour of England. She cannot defend herself for a day against, say, the Japanese if British protec tion be withdrawn. That is really the reason why she does not entirely exclude the Japanese. We ought to try our utmost to be be self-governing like the

colonies.

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