TOPICS OF THE DAY.

Press, Volume LVI, Issue 10265, 7 February 1899, Page 4

TOPICS OF THE DAY.

The committee of volun-

The teer officers whose sug-Route-Marching gestions as to the coinCompetition, ing route-marching com-

petition were adopted at the recent meeting of officers, are to be congratulated upon their report. They recommended that the teams should consist of not less than forty men, and that members of a team should be allowed to help each other, but that disqualification should be the penalty for receiving assistance from outsiders. These rules are so great an improvement on those which have governed these competitions in the past that one can only wonder how it was they were never adopted before. The main object of a route-marching contest is to test the capacity of the volunteers for a forced march in case such were ever necessary. Hitherto the teams taking part in the contests held in Christchurch have consisted of sixteen rank and file (including corporals), two nort-commissioned officers, and an officer, nineteen in all, and they have not been allowed to give the slightest assistance to one another, so that if a' man broke down from exhaustion the team had to wait until he could go on again, or finish without him. The former course meant probable defeat and the latter disqualification. It came about, therefore, that the object of a forced march—the arrival of a body of troops at a certain spot in the shortest possible time—was entirely lost sight of, and the

competitions became a mere test—though a severe one—of the capacity of a small number of picked men from each company to walk for -thirteen miles at top speed under conditions as to clothes and impedimenta which made fast walking a great strain upon endurance. So long as nineteen men in a company could accomplish this, the rest of the company might have been cripples for all the goody.the competition did them. The object of a forced march, however/ ,as_, we have .pointed .out, is not to break records, but to enable•* as large a number of men as possible to reach a given spot quickly but in such condition that they shall be of service as fighting men. This object will not be reached in Christchurch until the route-marching competition takes place in the day time, and concludes with some shooting at the rifle range, in which th© number of effective shots at the targets shall be of more consequence in deciding who has won the contest than the knocking-off of minutes from the time in which the march has been accomplished before. But the new regulations are a great improvement on the old ones. The rule requiring that at least forty men—the minimum number which counts for a Government parade—shall be in each team may mean, and probably will, that the "time" of the march will not be so good—as goodness is counted in athletic sports—as it was last year, contest will be much more useful, and we hope to see as much interest taken in it, by both volunteers and public, as liehitherto been,the case.

Mbs Hodgson -Bt/rThe Creation nett, who is known of to fame more by her "Lord Fauntleroy." "Little Lord Faun-

tleroy" than by her novels and pretty, love tales, has experienced as varied scenes ,in her ascent to fortune as any literary womaiiTof the day. Her early home in Tennessee is visited every summer by numbers of pilgrims. / One" of these, a South American poet, Mr Hale, describes it as a little weather-board cottage of two room? standing in a neglected garden on the southern slope of a hill. Here she lived and dreamed for many*years, and old residents have seen, her in the woods not far off

wandering about and picking blackberries, a young girl, sturdy but not beautiful, "poor as any of the mountain folk, but with a stuckup air about her." The scenery around is very fine, with the roofs and spires of the little town in the distance among the valleys, hid? covered with pine and cedar, and beyond the blue crests of the mountains.,. A singular contrast to this primitive pastoral life is tc be found in the authoress''s present luxuriouF surroundings. She has lately'left a fine,, house in London and taken another in where she can gratify her mania for furnish-, ing and beautifying ."palatial residences. * ! She takes one after another, for-the mere joy of fitting up every detail as a painter would j work at a picture,to produce an artistic j effect. N When travelling on the Continent! she carried with her from place to place what she describes, as her "rag" box, filled j with bits of old brocades, fragments of old ' capes and chasubles, and the marriage veilr i of peasants. With these she drapes, all the' furniture in her dreary hotel rooms, hangprugs over the door, and completes the trans- - formation with ornaments of old silver and artistic photographs. It is curious to see this, love of luxury in one who, as a girl, was ' reared in poverty, and whose youth was so! close a companionship with nature. Her; literary work has suffered more than it has j gained by her wealth; her later books, and I even . "Through One Administration,"] "Louisiana," and "A Fair Barbarian." are; encumbered with upholstery and apparel, j They have lost almost all of the. freshness I and vigour of "That Lass o' Lowrie/s," that i first book of hers which took the public by storm. The British Astronomical Celestial Association at its last Photography, annual meeting reported a . very satisfactory state of affairs. The association is only eight years old. At its first meeting it enrolled 283 members. This year it can count between 1100 and 1200, and has not -only offshoots in different porta of Great Britain, but* two, very flourishing and energetic branch*, in.

Australia. Further, this association has the excellent record for an assemblage of scien- 7 title folk, who are usually supposed to be crotchety, of never yet having been disturbed by a quarrel. Jupiter, by the way, seems to be the most attractive of .planets, the section specially devoted to observing his ways numbering 70 active members. The "cotnetary section" is "not so well supported a.s could be wished," and the "coloured, star section" not advancing "as rapidly as desirable." An interesting part of the presi-don-tiial address deals with the star pbotography, which is now well within the sphere even of the amateur astronomer. It has been shown recently that excellent result, may be obtained with quite a small lantern lens, aud what with photographing meteor showers, aud fixing the place of faint aud extended nebula;, there „ mueli wonderful work to be done by camera craft Photography of the sun has not yet been able to give the minuto detail of tbe spots which can well be seen through the telescope. In many of the large solar photographs the penumbra is scarcely visible and on none can be traced that complicated structure with which eye observation has made science- familiar. Lunar photographs too, admirable as some are, do not yet supersede the old methods of oye and hand work. Enlargements have been carried to the utmost limits, beyond which the grain of the plate is rendered so conspicuous as to blur the details, without revealing more than „ can be easily seen with quite moderate i struments. Again, of Mars and Venus no photographs of the slightest value to science • have been obtained; in Saturn, all beyond the most obvious detail seems to be beyond the reach of the camera; and colour changes of course can only be recorded by the astronomer's hand. Still, the photographic section is extremely useful, and to this probably belong many of those amateur observers whom the vice-president greets with encouraging words and friendly warnings. One amusing hint concerns the error ' of reporting conclusions of measurement as if of au absolutely defined accuracy. "When (say) the diameter of Neptune is given to 'a mile,' we can,scarcely laugh at the possessor of the street telescope if he assures his* audience that 'we have measured the diameter of the moon to a hiiich.'"

Mr Edison has lately been A Telephone telling a friend how easy it

Round would be to encircle the The World, world with a telephone. It

sounds almost as easy as the old recipe for building a cannon—"Take a hole and pour a lot of iron round it." Mr Edison's scheme involves,. he said, "a cable laid across the Atlantic Ocean from New York to Southampton probably, and after passing under the English Channel by way of Paris, Berlin, Vienna, and Constantinople, across Asia"—as though he would say "across Broadway" "or Cheapside—"to Calcutta. Thence it would follow the Chinese coast to Behring Straits, and crossing over to Alaska it would run southward to San Francisco and

thence back to "New York." So far as t_? land part of the line is concerned, its construction would present no great difficuliiwj, except that a wire, different from the ordinary telephone wire, would liave to be used.. "Just how it will bq different is my own affair just now," said Mr Edison. "The poles won't have to be put up ten miles high, nor will it be necessary to coat the face of the transmitters with melted diamonds, or any o? that tommy-rot." He admitted; however, that the Atlantic Ocean did offer some obstacles—not insuperable ones, of courseMr Edison would never admit some difficulties which it would be-interest* ing work to surmou.pt. :Up~ to th*>-pre-sent all attempts to telephone <cross the Atlantic have failed, and the grci»t inventor declared that no one would be able to do so direct until some more powerful force than electricity had been discovered. He did not propose to waste time attempting the impossible, so he made experiments until the idea struck him of utilising the shoals in the ocean. Over each shoal he would anchor a _hin like a light-ship, connect each vessel to. the next one. with a cable, and thus turn them into relay stations. The success of _ the plan would depend partly upon finding shoals near enough to the sur* face at distances of from 50 to 100 mile* tho whole wav across, but. Mr Edison "guessed it was safe reckoning" that, they were there waiting to be discovered. He had not "exactly figured out" what thw "round-the-world telephone would cost, but it would be am appalling amount of money, far too much for any one company to raise, and the best wav would be to form separate syndicates for each country, each to erect and work t_at part of the telephone system running through its territory, and to levy its charges, leaving the Atlantic Ocean part of the line to be "worked by another syndicate. We doubt, however, if Mr Edison will ever see his "circum-terrestrial telephone" in working order; cheap cable* will probably render it quite unnecessary before long, and there are big possibilities id wireless telegraphy. But it is a truly Edi» sonian scheme. \ ■'