A Sense of the Futureby Jacob BronowskiOne hundred years ago, if you had walked on a summer evening into the country just beyond Bromley in Kent,you might have come on a remarkable sight.In the greenhouse of one of the larger and uglier houses of the neighborhood,a tall man in his sixties was stooping over potted plants.Beside him sat a younger man just as absorbed;and the younger man was playing the bassoon.This earnest pair was Charles Darwin and his son Frank;and they were making a scientific experiment.Darwin wanted to know exactly what tells an insect-eating plant like the common sundew to close its leaves when a fly settles on it.So he was going through the possible causes methodically one by one.Noise was not a likely cause;but it might just have worked;]and Darwin was not the man to rule out anything.He had tried sand and water and bits of hard-boiled egg, and now he was trying Frank's bassoon.Darwin never did get to the bottom of what makes the sundew close.But he almost did, and the next generation finished his work.He was well content with that.Darwin at sixty was a famous scientist who had changed our whole understanding of nature;yet he remained content to do tidy experiments that would bear fruit somewhere, sometime in the future.
