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privilege. What I have I will offer, and one who had shared with me the struggles and hardships that had to be faced, has wished to bequeath all that is hers for the same object. In all my struggling elforts I have not been altogether solitary; while the world doubted, there had been a few, now in the City of Silence, who never wavered in their trust.
INDIA’S SPECIAL APTITUDES IN CONTRIBUTION TO SCIENCE.
The excessive specialization in modern science has led to the danger of losing sight of the fundamental 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 realize the uniform march of sequence, order and law? India through her habit of mind is peculiarly fitted to realize 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 organized life and its multifarious activities of growth, of movement, and even of sensation. On looking over a hundred different lines of investigations 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 exceedingly short electric waves which served as a bridge over the gulf between visible and invisible lights; from this followed accurate investigation on the optical properties of invisible waves, the determination of the refractive powers of various opaque substances, the discovery of effect of air film on total reflection, and the polarizing properties of strained
