of
Jivaka, who afterwards became the physician of Buddha, making his way
from Bengal to the University of Taxila, in quest of knowledge.
Twenty-five centuries had gone by and there was before them another
pilgrim who had journeyed the same distance to bring, as an offering
what he had gathered in the domain of knowledge.

The lecturer called attention to the fact that knowledge was never the
exclusive possession of any particular race nor did it ever recognise
geographical limitations. The whole world was interdependent, and a
constant interchange of thought had been carried on throughout the ages
enriching the common heritage of mankind. Hellenistic Greeks and Eastern
Aryans had met here in Taxila to exchange the best each had to offer.
After many centuries the East and West had met once more, and it would
be the test of the real greatness of the two civilisations that both
should be finer and better for the shock of contact. The apparent
dormancy of intellectual life in India had been only a temporary phase.
Just like the oscillations of the seasons found the globe, great
pulsations of intellectual activity pass over the different peoples of
the earth.

With the coming of the spring the dormant life springs forth; similarly
the life that India conserves, by inheritance, culture and temperament,
was only latent and was again ready to spring forth into the blossom and
fruit of knowledge. Although science was neither of the East nor of the
West, but international in its universality, certain aspect of it gained
richness of colour by reason of their place of origin. India, perhaps
through its habit of synthesis, was apt to realise instinctively the
idea of unity and to see in the phenomenal world an universe instead of
a multiverse. It was this tendency, the lecturer thought, which had led
Indian physicist, like himself, when studying the effect of forces on
matter to find boundary lines vanishing, and to see points of contact
emerge between the realms of the living and non-living. In taking up the
subject of the evening's discourse on electric radiation of Hertzian
waves, the lecturer explained the constitution of the apparatus which he
had devised for an exhaustive study of the properties of electric waves.
His apparatus permitted experiments with the electric rays to be carried
on with as much certainty as experiments with ordinary light, and he
demonstrated the identity of electric radiation and light. The electric