In carrying out research, there are other difficulties, besides the want of well-equipped laboratories. We often forget that the real laboratory is one's own mind. The room and the instruments only externalise that. Every experiment has first to be carried out in that inner region. To keep the mental vision clear, great struggles have to be undergone. For its clearness is lost, only too easily. The greatest wealth of external appliances is of no avail, where there is not a concentrated pursuit, utterly detached from personal gain. Those whose minds rush hither and thither, those who hunger for public applause instead of truth itself, by them the quest is not won. To those on the other hand, who do long for knowledge itself, the want of favourable conditions does not seem the principle obstacle. In the first place, we have to realise that knowledge for the sake of knowledge is our aim, and that the world's common standard of utility have no place in it. The enquirer must follow where he is led, holding the quiet faith that things which appear to-day to be of no use, may be of the highest interest to-morrow. No height can be climbed, without the hewing of many an unremembered step! It is necessary, then, that the enquirer and his disciples should work on ceaselessly, undeterred by years of failure, and undistracted by the thunder of public applause. We may one day come to realise that India in the past has shared her knowledge with the world, and we may ask ourselves, is that destiny now ended for us? Are we of to-day to be debtors only? Perhaps when we have once felt this, a new Nalanda may arise. THE PHYTOGRAPH I was speaking of the need of various delicate instruments--phytographs, as I shall call them--for the automatic record of the plant's responses. What was, ten years ago, a mere aspiration, has now after so many years of effort, become actual fact. It is unnecessary to tell here of many a fruitless and despairing attempt. Nor shall I trouble you with any account of intricate mechanism. I need only say that with the aid of different types of apparatus, it is now possible for all the responsive activities of the plant to be written down. For instance, we can make an instantaneous record of the growth and its variations, moment by moment. Scripts can be obtained of its spontaneous movement. And a recording arm will demarcate the line of life from that of death. The extreme delicacy of one of these instruments will be understood, when it is said that it measures and records a time-interval so short as one-thousandth part of a second! It has been supposed that instruments for research of this delicacy and precision, were only possible of construction in the best scientific manufactories of Europe. It will therefore be regarded as interesting and encouraging to know that every one of these has been executed entirely in India, by Indian workmen and mechanicians.